Make no mistake, we're with you.  You're here because you already know how important food is to your pet.  Food makes for good health, happiness, and long lives.

Hello.  We're Jay and Michael Smith.  We started freshfetch Pet Foods in 2008 to bring ease, simplicity and science to the idea of feeding the best friends and -- really -- family members that we call pets.  Let's face it.  If humans always ate only food that had most of its moisture removed, and didn't really even resemble much of anything edible found in nature, we'd all probably make more frequent trips to the doctor -- or hospital -- and we couldn't really be surprised at stomach distress and never really feeling very healthy.  Why do we think that those reactions should be different for our pets?  Commercial pet foods haven't been around for very long.  Before commercial foods, people fed their pets diets very similar to the foods they ate.  It's this idea that we've revisited. 

Ancestral Food

What is ancestral food?  Simply put, it's the food that your dog's breed probably was fed while it was being developed as a breed.  If you think about it, a lot of people are trying to implement a rough version of this idea today.  They go back to the wolf as an early ancestor of domestic dogs, and believe that all dogs should be fed as wolves feed.  Though it may be true that domestic dogs' early ancestors were wolves, there has certainly been much genetic change introduced into our current domestic canine crowd.  Purebred dogs were carefully genetically bred, and that genetic change, when intentionally introduced into the lineage of the breed, probably shouldn't be ignored.

Ancestral foods represent great choices to answer the question "what is a dog's food supposed to be?"  Why?  Because all dogs are not wolves, and the differences between food requirements for different breeds can be astounding.  For instance, Boxers have problems with many multi-breed foods and tend to develop colitis moreso than other breeds.  So, multi-breed product can cause  gastric distress when it contains insufficient fiber to move the food along.  Some dogs that were bred in coastal areas of the world have trouble assimilating calcium and other minerals that are not from a coastal source.

So, we've awakened ancestral food for every breed for which we can find the information.  We try to re-create or approximate the foods that the breed would have been fed while it was being developed as a breed, before commerical food was popularized.  We do this because it's clear that ancestral foods allowed the breed to thrive, procreate, and provide us with the gifts of our pets today.

And since dogs, like other animals -- including humans -- require very long periods of time to change genetically, we can rely on the idea that ancestral foods are still good choices for the breed today.  So, when we measure out the right amount of protein, carbohydrates and fats using the ancestral foods, we can achieve a remarkable meal for the breed.

freshfetch's "Hippocratic" Oath

The "hippocratic" or doctor's oath contains a statement that we have revised for our company use. (Of course, we're not physicians.) Summarized, and translated, it reads: "I will prescribe regimens for the good ... according to my ability and my judgement and never do harm to anyone."

Above all, this is our goal:  to do no harm.  When we couple the concept of ancestral foods with the Nutritional Requirements published by the American Association of Feed Control Officials, and the National Research Council's Nutrition Guide for Dogs, we carefully analyze the fresh foods that we select to ensure that they are nutritionally sound for the breed, before we require that they satisfy ancestral food selection criteria.  In very, very few cases have we found that ancestral foods were not suitable to satisfy nutritional requirements for various breeds, and then, of course, the food isn't used in any of our recipes for the breed.

Our Pet Energy Requirement Calculation (PERC)

We wanted to create a way to adapt the food to the dog.  So, along with a new genre of pet food we invented a new internet-based system to help you keep track of your dog's weight, age, condition and other characterisitics.  When you keep this information up-to-date, we use it to formulate the food for your dog, and to ensure that each recipe is the perfect portion size, composition, and formula.

Our web site allows you to securely record and store the weight, age, and activity level of your dog, so that we can use this information to re-size the meals you order as time goes by.  All of this happens automatically.  So, if your dog is overweight, we scale the calories back until you report to us that your dog's weight has become closer to normal for the breed or for the dog.  Once that happens, we automatically re-size the meals to make it easier for your dog to maintain the new weight.

Each time you update your pets PERC, we adjust the daily portion size for your dog so that there's no underfeeding or overfeeding. You can even view a chart of your dog's weight progress in your account!

How We Formulate Our Recipes

To formulate our recipes, we use methods similar to those that are used by prestigious veterinary clinics such as UC Davis' School of Veterinary Medicine (see here ). Around 40 essential nutrients are required by most dog breeds, as established by the 2006 publication "Nutrient Requirements of Dogs and Cats," published by the National Research Council. We supplement these nutrient requirements with information from the Association of Animal Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), and sources such as breeders. But, then we examine specific nutrient requirements for the specific breed, using information from breeders and other sources.  We're not content to stop there, though.  We are constantly open to ideas and information to help us make our recipes more nutrititionally complete and appropriate for each breed we serve.

• Life Stages: Puppies require uniquely different nutrition than adult dogs or senior (mature dogs).
• Composition: The ratios of protein, carbohydrates and fat that should be consumed by various breeds at different Life Stages.
• Metabolic Energy Requirements: We call it a PERC (Pet Energy Requirement Calculation).  This is the amount of calories that a dog needs to consume to power its daily activities.  Too much, and the dog puts on fat (not good), too little and the dog will ultimately display lethargy, loss of muscle mass, and other unhappy results.
• Breed-dependent Requirements.   There are hundreds of these, but here's an example: Many commercial pet food manufacturers create a "large breed" formula.  freshfetch Pet Foods are designed specifially for the breed.  So, if your dog's breed is large, the formula you recieve from us will be designed for its size.  For instance, a larger breed dog's puppy and adolescent recipe's composition will contain less protein, to modify large bone growth that is so often problematic in large-breed dogs.
• Foods to Avoid:  Some foods are just not good for some breeds of dogs, while they are perfectly good (and beneficial) for other breeds.  We've created lists of foods to feed, and foods to avoid for each of the breeds for which we create recipes.  These lists are automatically consulted when our chefs begin to design a recipe for your pet.