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.

History of the Honest Kitchen

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.

Why This Multimillion Dollar Pet Food Company Won't Sell to PetSmart or Petco

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.