Cali Raw Nutrition: Facing unique challenges at one year

Raw pet food company Cali Raw Nutrition, founded in April 2019, is now making its way through unprecedented times in a niche market and meeting challenges head on.

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Cali Raw Nutrition Founder and CEO Brandine Strand, seen here with her dogs Bodhi, a French Bulldog, and Dharma, a Pitbull, has had a memorable first year filled with growth and pivots as a global pandemic changes everyone’s business plans. | (Courtesy Cali Raw Nutrition)
Cali Raw Nutrition Founder and CEO Brandine Strand, seen here with her dogs Bodhi, a French Bulldog, and Dharma, a Pitbull, has had a memorable first year filled with growth and pivots as a global pandemic changes everyone’s business plans. | (Courtesy Cali Raw Nutrition)

When Brandine Strand started California,USA-based Cali Raw Nutrition in April 2019, she wanted to provide premium-quality raw dog food directly to consumers. The company provides its products via a monthly subscription and focuses on exceptional customer service to gain and retain its client base.

Cali Raw Nutrition is a thought leader of lifestage raw nutrition for dogs, with the first commercially available complete and balanced raw puppy food; formulated by our formulator James Pendergast,” says Strand. “We are dedicated to making it easy for pet parents to feed a fresh whole food diet to their dogs for enhanced health and longevity.”

Starting a pet food business is difficult. Starting a niche pet food business is even more so. Managing a one-year-old company in the middle of a global pandemic? That wasn’t in anyone’s business plan.

A key challenge during COVID-19: keeping up with demand

“Pandemic or not, owning a business you have to be prepared for anything at any time,” says Strand. “You have to be prepared to pivot; you have to find solutions. I think that owning and running a business is nothing but solving problems. There are solutions out there; we just have to find them.”

One of the problems Cali Raw has had to deal with involves the supply chain. The company, which was already growing 25–35% month-over-month, has seen further increased business due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We had a large influx of new customers towards the end of March and that level of influx has stayed the same,” says Strand. “We had about 50% growth from March to April and 40% growth from April to May [2020]. The [increased] need for home delivery we saw almost immediately, on March 15, when fear hit an extreme high for most Americans — the very next day it was order after order after order.”

For a raw pet food company that serves customers nationally but is majority regional due to the nature of its products, the sudden hit on inventory was significant.

“We did have a couple of weeks where we had to delay our new customer orders,” she says. “Because of the growth we actually got pretty low on the inventory, and in order to reserve our inventory for our subscribers who are reliant on us, we delayed new customer orders for two weeks.”

The temporary halt on new orders gave Cali Raw time to adjust its supply needs to meet the new demand.

“We’ve since been able to restock our freezers — we have large amounts of inventory in production right now — to try to leverage ourselves against any potential supply chain issues,” says Strand. “We source a lot of different ingredients, and any one of those ingredients being unobtainable could create a lot of problems and delays for us. So right now we’re staying 30–60 days ahead on inventory the best we can predict.”

Sourcing, transportation during a pandemic cause additional challenges

Since the staple ingredients of Cali Raw’s pet foods (currently four adult and two puppy formulas) have continued to be easily sourced, Strand is more focused on the potential supply challenges of specialty ingredients.

“The staples — beef, chicken, turkey and lamb — we haven’t had any issues in sourcing those products, and our suppliers tell us there are no issues with that,” she says. “We’ve seen some increases in pricing, but we haven’t had issues sourcing. It’s the things like salmon oil, sunflower oil, those types of ingredients that I worry about just because they’re a little harder to source.”

Transportation challenges have caused issues on multiple fronts, from getting ingredients to getting product to customers.

“For example, getting things from the East Coast right now there are a lot of shipping problems,” says Strand. “The shipping industry right now is really struggling. Everybody is ordering online, home delivery is at an all-time high, and UPS, FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service, they’re all drowning. In some cases I’ve had to find alternate suppliers on the West Coast just to ensure we can product to us faster. Shipping from Wisconsin, USA, to California, USA, can take up to two weeks right now.”

Furthermore, “we’ve seen delays in certain regions of the country that have caused us a lot of loss of product,” she says. “We’ve predominantly used UPS and we haven’t had many issues with them, but there have been a couple UPS hubs that have been backlogged for the last couple weeks. It cost us, as a small business, thousands and thousands of dollars of product that we had to re-ship to our customers because it sat at a hub for 10 days. So we’ve been trying to find solutions to that; obviously we’re working within a pandemic and there’s exceptional circumstances that are causing these problems.”

One solution is that Cali Raw has started using OnTrac, a privately held logistics company that contracts regional shipping services in the Western U.S.

“They deliver within one day all over California,” says Strand. “So that’s really great for our customers moving into summertime. This is also helping us with Arizona, USA, which is our second-biggest state for customers and obviously very hot, because now all our customers in Arizona are able to get their orders the very next day. We’re finding solutions that work out better for our customers in the long run.”

Virtual communication with customers: the new normal

Strand says she firmly believes in the power of word-of-mouth marketing and that it’s particularly important in the raw pet food space.

“I think that raw food has such a visible impact on dog health that people are more likely to talk about it,” she says. “If they switch their dog to a healthier kibble and their dog trims up, they’re not necessarily going to go tell all their friends. But if they start feeding their dog something that clearly changes their dog’s life for the better, they’re more likely to go tell their friends, talk about it, rave about it.”

And that’s exactly what Cali Raw is aiming for.

“We don’t just want satisfied customers, we want loyal customers,” says Strand. “We want customers thinking we’re so great they want to tell their friends. If you’re building a business and your customers aren’t creating customers for you, there’s no sustainability in that. You can continue to dump money into marketing and advertising and you can get new customers; you can pay for that. But if you’re losing customers and dumping money into marketing, that’s not a sustainable business model.”

Unfortunately, two of Cali Raw’s primary methods of communicating with their customers outside social media — monthly meet-ups and pack walks for pet parents living locally in Orange County that include the company’s staff — are no-gos under current COVID-19-related social distancing and gathering restrictions. But Cali Raw has found a solution to that, as well, in the form of monthly Zoom meetings.

“We’ve been inviting our customers to join us once a month on a live Zoom that is essentially like an FAQ where we go over any questions customers ask us,” says Strand. “It’s been really fun for us. For our customers it’s not a perfect substitute for community meet-ups and personal interactions, but it’s allowed us to stay in touch. And I think it’s also given our customers an opportunity to meet us and get to know the team, especially the customers who aren’t local in Orange County who don’t already know us.”

Strand says things are going well enough that she sees opportunities for expanding the idea of digital meetings, even beyond the pandemic.

“With everybody embracing Zoom so much right now, I think there’s an opportunity for us to use it as a platform for education and accessibility,” she says. “Allowing our customers nationwide to see our faces, meet the team, ask us questions, I think it’s really valuable. We want to offer that education to other pet industry professionals, because we know that they have an influential voice in the market and with their customers.”

Business expansion continues, albeit cautiously

Pre-pandemic, Cali Raw had big plans for 2020. The company intended to introduce a raw cat food line as well as expand its treats and supplements offerings. And that’s still the plan, but Strand says she’s paying even more attention to the state of her business.

“It’s quite challenging to be at this stage of a startup, where things are changing so quickly and growth is happening and I don’t know what next month is going to be like,” she says. “[Introducing cat formulas is] something we very much would like to do this year, but before we do that I want to ensure we’re stable, that supply chains and shipping are stable. We’ve also had a lot of requests for adult blends. Right now all our adult formulas are single-source protein and our puppy formulas are blends. So I think that’s something we’re going to put into development alongside our cat formulas, hopefully before the end of the year.”

And overall, Strand says she expects the trend of wanting to feed pets the best food possible will continue.

“The future of pet food is fresh, whole food,” she says. “There are a lot of fresh and raw dog food companies emerging and I think it’s great. With somewhere around 95% of dogs eating processed food, we all have our work cut out for us to chip away at that number together.”

 

Fast Facts

cali-raw-logo

Headquarters:  Newport Beach, California, USA

Officers: Bradine Strand, founder and CEO; David Johnson, director of finance; James Pendergast, formulator

Brands: Cali Raw Nutrition

Website/Social Media: www.CaliRaw.com, @caliraw on Facebook and Instagram, @calirawco on Twitter

Notable: Cali Raw’s mission is inspired by and dedicated to the memory of Clyde, the company founder’s first dog love, a golden long-haired chihuahua with a chocolate brown nose and a personality full of charm and spunk.

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