Ollie Snacks — Human-grade treats for healthy pups

@rrhoover OMG you told them our secret! 😂

@jimmydouglas @rrhoover When we made our first batch, it got a little out of hand & we probably over-indexed on human testers vs. dogs. They're made to the same human-grade standards that we apply to our meals, though they've got none of the artificial smoke/chipotle/over-salted flavors of human-centric jerky.

@rrhoover @mjbreuer So it's BETTER for us than human food!

@rrhoover @jimmydouglas still probably better for them though

@kcucchia oh you're gonna be great - they're easy to snap into smaller sizes for the smallbois but I'm thinkin' you just might take care of one in one-sitting.

@mjbreuer congrats on the 1st anniversary! Snacks looks interesting and I'd suspect, much easier to ship than perishable food that you launched with. two questions for you: (1) I'm curious but any big takeaways in the last 365 days since starting the company? (2) can a customer buy Snacks as a one-off product or is it bundled via subscription?

@daveambrose thanks! (1) Maybe others would answer differently, but I think there is a huge education opportunity in this space. When we look at all the folks who have come to us over the past year struggling to find the right fit for their pet, the success of "Pet Fooled", I think it's clear that people are waking up about pet food, but don't really know what the right steps to take are. We're trying to approach it from all angles - a really consultative onboarding experience that let's you know WHY we've made our food this way, marketing that tries to clear up some of the pet food myths, and investing in our Canine Care team to give people the best possible experience. (2) Snacks are exclusively bundled with the meal plan - we're looking at it as an extension of your Ollie experience. From my experience with my little guy Tom, all it would take is one walker sneaking him too many treats, and suddenly his stomach was acting up. Since we started R&D (and we were clear only to feed him our treats) he's been better than ever. I's an easy customer experience (I get everything at once) and it's all coming from the same source.

@mjbreuer I like that your treats only have one ingredient in them. I got Yahtzee ~3 years ago, and for diet he eats raw beef (I buy bulk and then meal-prep it out) supplemented with a well-investigated 5-star kibble*. For treats I just bake some liver and chop it up, although my local grocery store has just added some 1-ingredient dried liver treats themselves, which are great. It takes a little bit of extra time to prep, but makes it super easy to keep him at an ideal weight, and ensures he's eating pretty 'clean' food. A meal-based product like yours wouldn't really help me a lot (plus it's about 4x what I currently pay to feed my dog, even using beef steak), but I can see that for a lot of people it would be a really good option, particularly for owners who want to be responsible but are a bit lazy. Also, love that you guys are capitalising on the hype around a documentary. It'll be interesting to see if the big brands change their strategy in the same way that McDonalds did after the release of Super Size Me... though pretty sure most people ignore the salad options and still get bic macs. I know you've got a bit of an overview there, but a great content piece for your blog would be more in-depth detail on your ingredients, particularly with relation to the supplements.

@gazzer82 Your twitter profile says you live in LA though :) I'm Australian, definitely frustrating, but totally expected for products like this, particularly food related ones. Thing is, even when designing products/services, I always target them for the US. Their market is bigger - it makes no sense trying to tailor something for my local market when it's saas/product-based.