MATTHEW ANDERSON EATS dog food. No, it’s not a prank. It’s quality control. He samples the kibble made by his Indianapolis company before it goes out the door. His employees do, too. “We eat from every batch,” he says. “Our production manager tastes the last sample to be sure it’s on par.”
Anderson got into the dog food business when his mutt, Futureman, became ill. Due to his own health issues, he was studying nutrition and started scrutinizing canine food, too. He didn’t like what he found: many unfamiliar, heavily processed ingredients. So he tried to do it better.
That experiment played out in his apartment kitchen, where he baked batch after batch of food, testing numerous recipes as well as the limits of his oven’s ventilation system. “When I added fish … remember in college when that one person would use the dorm kitchen to cook fish? That’s how badly it reeked.”
After about six months of tinkering, Anderson developed a crunchy formula made from a short list of ingredients including fish, beef liver, chicken quarters, whole eggs, lentils, and apples. He then brought in nutritionists, food scientists, and canine formulation specialists to refine it into a product he trusted enough to sell. The result was Kibbies, a dry dog food processed at relatively low temperatures to preserve flavor and nutrients. One of its key ingredients is Asian carp, an invasive species that’s abundant, sustainable, and—when finely ground, bones and all—quite nutritious for dogs.
Kibbies is produced in small batches at an industrial kitchen on the city’s east side and shipped to roughly 200 subscribers, with delivery schedules customized to each pet’s size and calorie needs. Package size stays modest, Anderson says, because freshness matters even more to canines (with their sensitive noses) than people. Anderson, of course, hopes his list of customers keeps growing. “I want as many dogs eating this food as possible,” he says. “But I don’t want to cut corners or degrade our quality just to scale up.”
