The Honest Kitchen, a pet food company that markets its products as human-grade, was included in the 2016 Entrepreneur 360 list from Entrepreneur magazine. Lucy Postins, the Honest Kitchen’s founder and CEO, was recently interviewed by the magazine.
The Honest Kitchen achieved an average growth of 35 to 45 percent per year, said Postins, and last year’s revenue was US$30 million.
That growth was achieved without selling in large-scale pet retailers, such as Petco. Postins said the Honest Kitchen’s strategy was to stick with specialty pet food shops so that store clerks could educate consumers about the products.
Postins also discussed how the Honest Kitchen had achieved FDA approval to label their pet food as human-grade.
The Honest Kitchen, which began making human-grade pet foods in 2004, first obtained an FDA statement of no objection to using the term human-grade that same year, reported Petfood Industry. In the fall of 2013, the Honest Kitchen elected to renew that claim approval with FDA. The process involved providing detailed documentation from each of the Honest Kitchen’s suppliers to verify the human-edible status of every ingredient used in the company’s recipes.
The Honest Kitchen was ranked in the 2016 Entrepreneur 360™, our annual list of the best entrepreneurial companies in the U.S. Founder and CEO Lucy Postins will make an appearance on a panel at the Entrepreneur 360™ Conference. The original interview by Matt McCue appears in the November 2016 issue of Entrepreneur.
Tim Wall covers the dog, cat and other pet food industries as a senior reporter for WATT Global Media. His work has appeared in Scientific American, Live Science, Discovery News, Honduras Weekly, Global Journalist and other outlets. He holds an M.A. in journalism and an M.S. in natural resources, both from the University of Missouri - Columbia, along with a bachelor's degree in biology.
Wall served in the Peace Corps in Honduras from 2005 to 2007, where he coordinated with the town government of Moroceli to organize a municipal trash collection system, taught environmental science, translated for medical brigades and facilitated sustainable agriculture, along with other projects.
Contact Wall via https://www.wattglobalmedia.com/contact-us/
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