On this episode of Best Bets for Pets, Michelle Fern chats with Matt Terrill, Co-founder & CEO of ChefPaw, the world’s first pet food maker of its kind! With fresh dog food subscriptions costing a fortune, ChefPaw offers an innovative solution—allowing pet parents to cook nutritious, homemade meals for their dogs in just 40 minutes, saving time and money. Featuring a built-in scale, self-cleaning mode, and a smart app with 35+ vet-approved recipes, ChefPaw makes fresh feeding easier than ever. Tune in to discover how this game-changing appliance is revolutionizing pet nutrition!
EPISODE NOTES: Revolutionizing Pet Nutrition: Meet ChefPaw, the Ultimate Fresh Food Maker!
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/best-bets-for-pets-the-latest-pet-product-trends-pets-animals-pet-life-radio-original--6667904/support.
EPISODE NOTES: Revolutionizing Pet Nutrition: Meet ChefPaw, the Ultimate Fresh Food Maker!
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/best-bets-for-pets-the-latest-pet-product-trends-pets-animals-pet-life-radio-original--6667904/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Pet Life Radio. Let's Talk Pets.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello, pet lovers, Welcome to Best Bests from Pets. I'm
your show host Michelle Burns. So you know a lot
of people are now. We're buying our pets premium food.
Our dogs are eating you know, raw, they're eating fresh.
It's a whole new world out there. Well wait till
you'll meet my guest today. He invented a product that
(00:44):
does it all for you and it's quite incredible. Stay tuned,
you don't want to miss this.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
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(01:16):
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Speaker 4 (01:29):
Let's talk pets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Welcome back everyone. I'd like to welcome Matt trop Here's
the co founder and CEO of operations of Chef Paul welcome.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Matt, thank you for having me here. I'm really excited
to be on PETLAF Radio.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I'm so excited to have you. Can you share a
little bit about your background.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Well, yeah, I grew up in Manhat Beach, California, and
went to the University California at Santa Barbara, and I
knew pretty pretty fast that what I wanted to do
was something around pets, my dog specifically. I wanted to
make life better for dogs. And shortly after graduating college,
my labrador had a bad ear infection and I invented
(02:21):
a tool to solve it and got a patent on that.
It's an ear applicator for ear medicines and ear cleaners,
and I thought that's just the perfect way to start
a business around an actual need and a unique innovative product.
So me and my best friend at the time we
created Innovet Pet Products and that was two thousand and five,
(02:44):
and since then we've been using the needs and the
problems that our pets encountered where there wasn't a better solution,
and we use those as opportunities to try and find
innovations and try and make things better for our own
pets and that's what's led us to success, and that's
what led us about three years ago to get into
(03:05):
the pet food market in an incredibly unique way, and
that's how chef Paw got created.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Okay, thank you for that, And now let's talk about
chef Paw kind of briefly because we're going to go
into more detail, but so people know what we're talking about,
if you can kind of describe it as well, that
would be great.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
Well.
Speaker 5 (03:24):
Yeah, so chef Paw is the first of it's kind
at home dog food maker, and it cooks and it mixes,
and it's about the size of a blender. It's a
countertop appliance, it doesn't use up too much electricity, and
you just put the fresh ingredients in it, ingredients from
any grocery store, turn the machine on, and forty minutes
(03:45):
later you have six pounds of cooked and mixed dog food.
And we developed an app too that comes along with
it to give people a thorough guide, step by step
of how to add ingredients into the machine. Because the
machine has a built in scale and so it really
makes everything streamlined and straightforward.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
So we're going to talk more about this later. But
you really thought, I mean, you really thought this out, Chapa,
there's a scale, there is a it does it all
in one, you know, chopsy ingredients, cooks the ingredients, waist
the ingredients. I mean, it's really user friendly. Is that
what you were thinking when you came up with that
we have to do everything all in one?
Speaker 4 (04:27):
Well?
Speaker 5 (04:27):
Yeah, the original inspiration behind it was I've been on
a quest ever since I had my own dog in
two thousand, I've been on a quest to find the
best dog food, and over years and years that led
me to fresh store bought dog food. And then I
noticed that what my really active labrador was not able
(04:48):
to get enough calories. I was having to feed him large,
really large portions, which I felt dangerously large portions. And
then my other dog, a bulldog, he developed food allergies,
and so I needed to find way to customize that
fresh food. And so that's where I started going down
a quest of trying to see how can I recreate
(05:08):
the best store bought fresh foods and customize them really,
really easily. So when I suspected that my bulldog was
allergic to chicken, I put them on a novel protein
diet that had definitely no chicken in it, and then
once that once after being on the novel protein diet
for two months, and that resolved all of his symptoms.
(05:31):
I used our original prototype chef bomb machines to change
one ingredient at a time in his recipe in order
to identify which things, which foods he was allergic to,
and how to customize it. And we actually started off
making unreasonably large machines that were making like one hundred
pounds of dog food at a time. But once we
(05:53):
nailed down the proof of concept and the recipes that
we were developing cured my bulldog's skin allergy and his
food allergies, and got my labrador enough energy to where
you could have a normal sized meal and be gaining weight,
then we knew we were really onto something, and we
began working on scaling the machines that we the prototype
(06:15):
machines down to the smallest that they could be and
be really effective and make a decent size batch quickly.
And that's where we where we settled with the current
chef Paal machine making six pounds and forty minutes.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Okay, we're going to talk more about how it actually
works and the app on our second half, but a
few more questions, So thank you. That was great information
on how it came about. What if you buy fresh
food but your dog doesn't have allergies, is not super
active because most dogs are not too active, but some are,
(06:51):
but most are not. So for the average dog at home,
what is the benefit of making your own dog food
versus says, Let's take it a step further, say you're
not buying fresh versus canned and dry food together. A
lot of people do wet food, some do wet and
dry viewer, I think, from my experience, do just dry.
(07:14):
So what are the benefits just making your own food
versus buying canned and everything? I mean, prices have gone
up for dog food like double in the last three years.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about it. That's what
that was. The second motivator behind it was the price.
I was spending over one thousand dollars a month for
two average sized dogs and that was really bad.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
And I mean for fresh food though, right.
Speaker 5 (07:38):
Yeah, yeah, And all that aside, the first real benefit
is their poops, their poops becoming easy to pick up.
I'm sure a lot of pet parents out there have
encountered the horrible situation where you switch to a new food,
whether it's fresh or dry or canned, and their bowels
don't react to it well and it makes an absolute mess.
(07:59):
And especially if you have more than one dog, then
the first dog makes a mess, the second dog steps
in it, and then you're just it's just chaos. So yeah,
So that is one of the things we're very proud
of is with our recipes, dogs get perfect poops right
off the bat. There's little to no transition that's needed
(08:19):
to go from dry food or can food over to
our recipes, and that is that's one of my favorite
things about it really that I don't have to the
messes that I've avoided.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
So wait, so if there's good poops, that means that
they're digesting it without a lot of issues.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Oh yeah, thanks for bringing that up. That was the
other thing that I noticed too, is hands down, fresh
food was better than all the drying can foods out there.
I was noticing that no matter how expensive of fresh
foods I was buying, the dogs were having irregular bowel
movements and you could see half of the ingredients in
(09:01):
their poop undigested because it's either undercooked or two larger
pieces were not you know, cud into small enough pieces. Yeah,
so it was. It was. It was a combination of
spending one thousand dollars a month on the best store
bought dog food that I could get, plus seeing them
making a mess of you know, when they're when they're
they're pooping everywhere, and then seeing that they're not digesting
(09:22):
a lot of those ingredients that I'm paying top dollar for.
And so part of the original mission with the chef
PA was make sure make sure that it's you know,
it's not enough to just have fresh food. It needs
to be cooked perfectly and you know, so that it's
so that it's digestible. And the flip side of that
is it's got to be not overcooked. So many, so
(09:43):
many of the foods out there are are are overcooked,
whether it's fresh or I mean kibble by definition is
is overcooked. But a lot of the fresh foods out there,
and when people make homemade foods too, they they tend
to overcook it and that that comes with its own
set of problems.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Let me ask you this, what about raw which I'm
going to try to keep my opinion out of that,
but I'm passionate about my opinion on raw food. But
what about raw, Because I've heard that a lot of
guests recently and learned a lot about raw, and a
lot of people think raw is the way to go.
(10:20):
But you know, Chef Paup cooks the food.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
Yeah, that's a good point. We cook at a very
low temperature. So I think the raw diet is great.
It's really great. It's a tremendous improvement, and I really
applaud people that try it. But for every five people
that we've talked to who say that they are on
the raw diet and they really like it, we come
across ten people who say that they tried the raw
(10:46):
diet and had a horrible experience with it, And that
horrible experience usually winds up at some point being like
a salmonilla contamination that gets either the dog very sick
or their children very sick. And so basically the Chef
Paw recipes in the machine, it's designed to take all
the benefits of raw and just cook it just enough
(11:09):
so that you've sanitized it and eliminated any harmful bacteria.
And to that end, people still said, there are a
lot of people that would say, hey, you know, any
cooking at all is going to destroy nutrients.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
That's not true.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
Well, yeah, on some level, as you heat there are
things that will break down. But to prove that once
and for all, a few months ago, we sent in
samples of our primary recipe. Well we have forty recipes,
but our recipe number one, we sent it in to
get tested. We made one batch of it with our machine,
(11:44):
but we didn't cook it, and we just blended it.
Our machine has many different speeds. It can mix really
gently and make it chunky, or you can turn up
the mixing speed and blend it to a complete pure
if needed. So we took one batch and just blended it,
no heat, no cooking whatsoever, and sent that in for testing,
and then made an identical batch and blended it up
(12:04):
just as much, but cooked it at the normal chef
Pac cooking temperatures, which is one hundred c or two
hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit. And what happens is when
it's cooked in the chef Pal machine, the food is
really only encountering temperatures that are above about one hundred
and sixty fahrenheit for the last ten minutes of the
cooking cycle, So the food's only encountering low temperature cooking
(12:29):
only for a few minutes toward the end of the
cooking cycle, and it's just enough to soften things like
carrots and sweet potatoes and rice, but it's not enough
to break down nutrients. And so we sent in the
second sample of the cooked and blended recipe. We were
surprised to find that I expected to find at least
a little bit of a breakdown. There was virtually none.
(12:50):
There was less than two percent moisture loss from the cooking,
and there was virtually no caloric loss. There were even
things like some carbohydrates were increased because starches were converted
over and you know, we tested for zinc amounts and
adine amounts and vitamins and all that, and it didn't
break down. There was no appreciable, no statistically appreciable breakdown
(13:15):
when of any of the nutrients when you cook with
our chef Pal machine.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
So I was right. I love to be right, but
I didn't really know that I was right. But I
understand what you're saying, and you hit on it when
you said about raw That's one thing that bothers me
is that there's bacteria in law. So I'm not discounting law,
but there's bacteria, so you have to be aware of that. Yeah,
we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back, Molly.
(13:43):
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Speaker 4 (14:33):
Let's talk past it.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Let's done.
Speaker 7 (14:35):
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Speaker 2 (14:49):
Welcome back everyone. We're talking to Matt Tarrell. He is
the co founder and CEO of operations for Chef Paul.
We had a very lively first part of the show,
and I'm excited to get onto this second part. So
we talked about the importance of Chef pa You know
what it does the like cooking for the nutritional benefits
(15:09):
are there there, they're just it seems like there's not
much of a difference between raw and the Chef pau cooking.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
Yeah, just no, there's no. It's all the benefits of raw,
but none of the risk of equal.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Eye very good. Is it similar to okay, just so
people have an idea. I haven't even red meat in
more decades than I want to say, but is it
similar to like maybe a rare steak where it's cooked
a little bit so that it's safer to eat, but
it's still what would be a good visual as far
(15:43):
as how lightly it's cooked.
Speaker 5 (15:45):
Well, that all depends on what mixing speed you select,
and there's four different cooking mixing speeds to choose from.
The first one is very gentle. It rotates very slowly,
you know, maybe like ten rpm. And the rotating blades
they're sharp on one side and dull on the other.
And so what the basic number one speed setting does
(16:09):
is it rotates in the toward the sharp blade direction.
For thirty seconds, and so it's doing it's doing very
minor chopped chopping and cutting and doing it slowly, and
then every thirty seconds it stops and it reverses its
direction and so now the dul the dull side of
the of the mixing blade is pushing the food and
(16:29):
so there's no cutting there. It's just mixing everything around.
So that has the effect of distributing the heat evenly
across all the foods. So it's not going to be
like a steak that's that's even though it's even though
it's low temp, it's not quite analogous to a steak
that's cooked rare because you know, the steak's not getting
(16:51):
cooked from the inside out. It's getting for most cooking methods.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
That's my analogy. Okay, what was similar to.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
It would be it would be similar to more like
more like ground beef in a stew. The main part
of it is to is to make sure everything is
cooked evenly, and most pets really like like chunky foods,
so we really designed the machine to cook at the
lowest temperature possible and just get everything evenly cooked. I'm
(17:24):
sure people that have tried cooking homemade before with like
a pressure cooker or an instapot. They've noticed that the
food on the on the outsides of the bowl will
be cooked, but then the food in the center is
not cooked because there's no mixing going on in those devices.
So yeah, fortunately blenders don't cook and instapots don't mix.
(17:46):
And so we've we've done the chef Pause. Primary primary
achievement is to is to combine both of those mixing
and cooking into one machine. But it's not that's not
enough to to get a success full batch reliably without
having to put a lot of thought into it. And
that's where the chef Pot app that we developed comes in.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
I'm sorry to cut you off, it's exactly what I
was going to ask you about. How does the app work?
Because there's recipes in the app. There's some focus on
from the recipes on allergy, on nutrition, on renal health,
on if you need low calorie.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
Oh yeah, We've come up with a lot of recipes
and they're all inspired by either my own pets, my
family's pets, and our customers calling in and having a request.
And I'm one hundred percent certain that we're going to
keep rolling out new recipes. You know, I would be.
I'm going to be surprised if this time next year
we don't have a couple hundred recipes in the app.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
I think you'll ever have it recipes for cats?
Speaker 5 (18:47):
Oh yeah. In fact, people have been asking us that
every single day. And the reason why I haven't released
that yet is because the cats are formulating a homemade
recipe for a cat is a little more complicated than
than for dogs, or for humans or any other pets really,
So we wanted to have we we wanted to have more.
(19:10):
We wanted to have more nutritionists and veterinarians give their
feedback on what that would need to be. And there's
a kind of a universal sentiment amongst the nutritionists and
the veterinarians that unlike the wide variety of dog recipes
that we have for cats, it needs to be just
(19:31):
a much narrower set just too. So we've been we've
been working on it, and we just we actually just
coincidentally sealed the deal with a with a board certified
nutritionists to sign up to sign off and uh and
finalize to cat recipes. And we already many months ago,
(19:52):
we already finished the on the back end of the
software and the app we created the ability to add
more species, and so it's all I have to do
is flip a switch and cats will be will be
an option on there where. Yeah, within just a couple
of weeks, we're going to have the first the first
two cat recipes turned on and everyone will be able
(20:13):
to use that.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
I can't wait.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
Thanks, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I tested Chef Paul, but my dogs are in doggy Heaven,
so I had to test it for my nephew dog, Charlie,
and for Tilly, my friend dog. So but cats, and
my cats eat everything, even Lettuce. Dennis likes Lettuce. I
don't get that.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
All right.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
So earlier when we were first talking, Matt, you mentioned
you can click six pounds of food in forty minutes.
I don't think my dogs ate nearly that much in
a day. What is the average, isn't it like? What
is the average sized portion?
Speaker 5 (20:55):
Well, the average sized portion I would probably be best
to find by what the NRC calls at. What the
all the NRC nutritional standards revolve around. And that's a
thirty three pound dog eating a thousand calories a day.
I don't know off the top of my head how
many that how many cups that is, But that's at
(21:18):
least a week of food for the average dog.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
So this is easier than going to the store. I
mean you have to get the store to buy the ingredients,
but then for a week, and is it best to
have it frozen or is it best to just you
can keep it fresh in your fridge for a week.
Speaker 5 (21:33):
Yeah, there's such a wide variety of applications. There's a
lot of people that have small dogs where the six
pound batch would last a month, and so that's it's
kind of excessive for them, and so they really ought
to select the half batch option in the app. And
that and because the app gives you regardless of what
batch size you choose, the app gives you, well, let
(21:55):
me say, regardless of which batch size you choose, and
regardless of which recipe you choose, the app gives you
step by step instructions on which ingredients to add and
how much to the machine. And so a lot of
people that have really small dogs, they opt to do
the half batch option. And that half batch option will
make three point one or three point two pounds in
(22:16):
twenty minutes, sometimes twenty five, but it basically and double
the speed there's a lot of other people who want
even more that have have much larger dogs, and so
they opt to do batches back to back and then
refrigerate the portions. There's actually people a lot of people
don't know this, but there's actually a lot of benefit
(22:38):
to cooling the food all the way down to refrigeration
temperature before before reserving it. There's a like, for example, rice,
when you when you cook it fully and then refrigerate
it down, the starches get converted into what's called a
resistance starch, and so that the resistance starches feed the
(23:00):
good gut bacteria and tend to reduce insulin spikes. Besides that,
we never want to feed our dog's food that's too hot,
so it's it's always best to refrigerate first before serving
it to them. And if you have excess food for
your dog, made nexcess number of batches, or you have
a small dog, it's completely fine to freeze that the food.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Also okay freezing it and then okay, so in there's
detha and there you go. Okay, So it's basically as
easy as looking at the recipe, buying the ingredients.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Yeah, and we've actually planned to take it a step
further than that and make it even easier. You may
have noticed in the app there's a when you select
a recipe, there's a button called grocery list, and if
you select that, it gives you a simple grocery list
with checkboxes next to each ingredient and a description of
(23:54):
how much the how much of each ingredient is needed
in turn of grams or ounces or pounds, because you know,
some some things in the store are sold in out sizes,
others are sold in in pound sizes, so makes makes
everything really really streamlined there. And we're not stopping at
(24:15):
that though. We're planning on combining that grocery list function
with same day delivery network such as Smart and Final
or like Misfit Foods.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
UH.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
We're we've been we're reaching out to UH to those
to those companies to get that arrangement done. But we've
already laid all of the infrastructure for it on the
on the back end in the app. It's ready to go.
All we have to do is just get a same
day fulfillment grocery store to let us send customers to them.
We don't we're not even gonna take a cut of
(24:53):
it in any way, we just want our customers to
have the easiest way to fulfill their grocery list at home.
So it would be ideal if you don't even have
to go to the grocery store. You just open up
the app, select which rescue you want to make, select
the grocery list, and then tap and then select which
(25:16):
ingredients you're short of, and then export that over to
the Smart and Final or the same day delivery network
and then arrise at your door.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Can't beat that. Okay, we have a couple more minutes.
Let's talk about cost, because I know my listeners and
I'm sure people are listening and saying this sounds good,
but it's probably going to cost a fortune. So I'm
a big believer in how cost effective something is, because
there are times I will buy something that's inexpensive and
(25:49):
I use it once or twice and it goes in
the garbage or it fails me, so what's the point.
But sometimes if you spend the money on something, the
effectiveness is worth it. So oh yeah, what's the cost
of the chef paw.
Speaker 5 (26:03):
Well, the upfront cost of the chef paw on sale
is going to be five ninety nine right now, and
we also have the it's a firm payment method where
you can break that down into monthly payments of I
believe forty nine dollars. But it pays for itself incredibly fast.
(26:24):
In my in my circumstance with just a labrador and
a bulldog, even if I didn't own the company and
I wasn't the inventor of this and I was just
buying it at full retail price, it would pay for
itself because, like I said, I was spending one thousand
dollars a month of just food. I don't want to
say the name of the company. I was spending one
thousand dollars a month and on what I felt was
(26:45):
the best possible store bought food and having and still
having a major problem with it. In my specific case,
it pays for itself in just a few weeks. The
average person, it pays for it's the machine would pay
for itself in a few months the average.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
So, say, if it's somebody that really wants to do,
you know, something different for their dogs, they're going from
canned to fresh, so probably for can they were probably
spending cost of groceries today, probably about we'll say a
forty pound dog close to the thirty three, probably about
(27:21):
what forty bucks a month.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
Well, yeah, I really like that. There's one common denominator
behind all the dog foods and the regular foods and
what we're used to, and that's cost per pound. I
really like breaking everything down into cost per pound. That
way you can have in apples for apples comparison of
all the different food options. So the average kibble is
going to cost about a dollar a pound. The best
(27:44):
kibble can get up to about a dollar fifty or
even two dollars a pound. Canned food gets a little
it starts out a little bit higher than that. But
fresh door bought food you can't you can't really find
it for under two dollars a pound. And the average
average door bought fresh food's going up to four or five.
Some of them are even ten to twenty dollars a pound.
And we're not talking about like some exotic venison or
(28:07):
you know, some tuna. It's it's it's just just store
abought dog food.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, I recomment because you didn't say the name. I'm
not going to say any names either, But when you
said one thousand a month for people that are listening,
that are going really This was about a year ago,
and I saw a dog food that this is when
mister Z was still around, you know, was longer than
this was for Nicky. Sorry. So I was looking at
this brand and what it would cost. And this is
(28:34):
for a thirteen pound dog. He was thirteen or fourteen pounds.
It was close to three hundred for one. That was
a couple of years or so ago. So I you
A thousand dollars is not yeah.
Speaker 5 (28:47):
And it doesn't start it didn't start out at one
thousand dollars per month. All these fresh food companies, they
they give you deals to get you in and then
it's not. It's not until like a month into it
and you're you know, your dog's used to that food.
And then they they the discounts and the deal stop
and you get the real price. And the real price
is always shocking, and they do a really good job
(29:10):
of not of obfuscating what the cost per pound is.
They'll say, oh, we're gonna we're gonna be sending you
there are twelve meals for fifty nine dollars. And then
you know, if you're like, wait a minute, each meal
is is a couple ounces, so you're talking a few pounds,
like you know, and then then wait, wait, then all
of a sudden you realize, wait a minute, I just
paid fifty nine dollars for three pounds of food. It's
(29:34):
it's we get that a lot from our customers, and
really the only way is that is to look at
it as cost per pound and so on. In our
app the when you select a recipe, it shows you
what the average cost is going to be. And you know,
obviously we can't we're not quoting. We can't tell you
what the price is exactly going to be because it
depends on what story you're going to. But we show
(29:56):
the average price in there. And now the average price
for our for our our recipes is in the two
dollars range. We have some we want to be extending
chef pa into working with shelters and getting shelter dogs
to be able to have good quality, fresh dog food
that is free of all the typical allergies. So we're
(30:16):
to have the best possible reaction to the widest variety
of dogs. And to that end, we needed to make
up really affordable recipes specifically for shelters. We call it
the Econ Dog Recipe set. I have four different econ
dog recipes that we've made. They are down to they're
under a dollar fifty a pound.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Wow, how about lasting? You know, because someone people listening
and I'd say, wow, six hundred dollars and you're going
to give me a good honest stance over this. How
durable is chef pa.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
The original two prototypes of the current machine that we're
selling right now. I've been using it myself for two
and a half years and trying everything I could to
find a way to break it. I use it, I
use outdoor in my front yard when it rains. I
do I you know, I do, I do. I'll do
all kinds of things to get it, to get them
to break. They haven't. We have a two year warranty
(31:09):
on the machine, and in another year from now, if
things keep going on this track, we'll probably expend extend
it out to a three year warranty. But I'm very,
very confident that that two year warranty is going to
be plenty of make plenty of sense for us, and
we're keeping our return rate and our warranty rate under
(31:30):
one percent. So it's yeah, it's really it's really phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
So is that available on your website or on the app.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
There's information available on that on the website and in
the app. When people select recipes, they can choose between
our forty different suggested recipes. They can customize those recipes
themselves in any way that they want. And then there's
community inspired recipes, So anyone who makes their own recipe
in our app or customizes one of our recipes in
(31:57):
the app, they have the ability to share with the community.
And then it goes into community inspired recipes. And then
the fourth option is custom veterinary created recipes, so you
can those people. If you select that, you can reach
out to our nutritionists and have a recipe made specifically
(32:18):
just for your pets conditions.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
That's fantastic. Where can people buy chef.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Pa chefpad dot com. If you google dog food Maker,
you will come up at the top there because there's
nothing else like it, but chefpad dot com is the
best way.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
It's incredible and I'm more of a baker than a cook,
and it was easy, so easy to use. Matt, I
want to thank you so much for coming on Best
Bets for Pets. I wish you amazing success with chef Paul.
Speaker 5 (32:43):
Thank you so much. It was great being here, great
talking to you.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Great talking to you too. Hey everyone, I hope you
enjoyed the show. Please be sure to check out chefpad
dot com. This is phenomenal if you feed your dog
fresh food, if you feed your dog, which of course
all of you do, right, so check this out. This
is a great product. Yes, the cost upfront is a
little high, but it is well worth it and very
(33:09):
cost effective. So chefpod dot com. Thanks to my guest
Matt for coming on Best Bets for Pets, and thanks
to my testers Charlie and Tillie. They had a great
time eating what I created. And I'm not a good cook,
I'm okay, but it was so simple to make so
I had a great time. So check it out chefpod
(33:31):
dot com. So thanks again to my testers, Thanks to
my feline crew Dennis, Molly and Charlotte. I will be
testing some cat recipes at some point that you guys
will get to try out. Thanks to everyone listening to
Best Bets for Pets. I really appreciate your time. And
thanks to my producer, Mark Winter for working a magic
(33:53):
and making me and my guests sound amazing. Now remember
keep listening. You never know what We're going to have
next on Best Bets for Pets.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
Let's Talk Pets every week on demand only on Petlifradio
dot com
This is Pet Life Radio. Let's Talk Pets.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello, pet lovers, Welcome to Best Bests from Pets. I'm
your show host Michelle Burns. So you know a lot
of people are now. We're buying our pets premium food.
Our dogs are eating you know, raw, they're eating fresh.
It's a whole new world out there. Well wait till
you'll meet my guest today. He invented a product that
(00:44):
does it all for you and it's quite incredible. Stay tuned,
you don't want to miss this.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
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if you can give them one more? But give them ten?
Movement is on a mission to help give cats an
extra life. How with spee and Neoter, Spain or nootering
your cat helps them live a longer, healthier life and
it helps control free roaming cat populations too. Learn more
(01:16):
about the benefits of spee and Neoter and meet Scooter,
the neuter cat at Give Them ten dot Org. That's
give them ten dot Org.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Let's talk pets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Welcome back everyone. I'd like to welcome Matt trop Here's
the co founder and CEO of operations of Chef Paul welcome.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Matt, thank you for having me here. I'm really excited
to be on PETLAF Radio.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I'm so excited to have you. Can you share a
little bit about your background.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Well, yeah, I grew up in Manhat Beach, California, and
went to the University California at Santa Barbara, and I
knew pretty pretty fast that what I wanted to do
was something around pets, my dog specifically. I wanted to
make life better for dogs. And shortly after graduating college,
my labrador had a bad ear infection and I invented
(02:21):
a tool to solve it and got a patent on that.
It's an ear applicator for ear medicines and ear cleaners,
and I thought that's just the perfect way to start
a business around an actual need and a unique innovative product.
So me and my best friend at the time we
created Innovet Pet Products and that was two thousand and five,
(02:44):
and since then we've been using the needs and the
problems that our pets encountered where there wasn't a better solution,
and we use those as opportunities to try and find
innovations and try and make things better for our own
pets and that's what's led us to success, and that's
what led us about three years ago to get into
(03:05):
the pet food market in an incredibly unique way, and
that's how chef Paw got created.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Okay, thank you for that, And now let's talk about
chef Paw kind of briefly because we're going to go
into more detail, but so people know what we're talking about,
if you can kind of describe it as well, that
would be great.
Speaker 6 (03:24):
Well.
Speaker 5 (03:24):
Yeah, so chef Paw is the first of it's kind
at home dog food maker, and it cooks and it mixes,
and it's about the size of a blender. It's a
countertop appliance, it doesn't use up too much electricity, and
you just put the fresh ingredients in it, ingredients from
any grocery store, turn the machine on, and forty minutes
(03:45):
later you have six pounds of cooked and mixed dog food.
And we developed an app too that comes along with
it to give people a thorough guide, step by step
of how to add ingredients into the machine. Because the
machine has a built in scale and so it really
makes everything streamlined and straightforward.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
So we're going to talk more about this later. But
you really thought, I mean, you really thought this out, Chapa,
there's a scale, there is a it does it all
in one, you know, chopsy ingredients, cooks the ingredients, waist
the ingredients. I mean, it's really user friendly. Is that
what you were thinking when you came up with that
we have to do everything all in one?
Speaker 4 (04:27):
Well?
Speaker 5 (04:27):
Yeah, the original inspiration behind it was I've been on
a quest ever since I had my own dog in
two thousand, I've been on a quest to find the
best dog food, and over years and years that led
me to fresh store bought dog food. And then I
noticed that what my really active labrador was not able
(04:48):
to get enough calories. I was having to feed him large,
really large portions, which I felt dangerously large portions. And
then my other dog, a bulldog, he developed food allergies,
and so I needed to find way to customize that
fresh food. And so that's where I started going down
a quest of trying to see how can I recreate
(05:08):
the best store bought fresh foods and customize them really,
really easily. So when I suspected that my bulldog was
allergic to chicken, I put them on a novel protein
diet that had definitely no chicken in it, and then
once that once after being on the novel protein diet
for two months, and that resolved all of his symptoms.
(05:31):
I used our original prototype chef bomb machines to change
one ingredient at a time in his recipe in order
to identify which things, which foods he was allergic to,
and how to customize it. And we actually started off
making unreasonably large machines that were making like one hundred
pounds of dog food at a time. But once we
(05:53):
nailed down the proof of concept and the recipes that
we were developing cured my bulldog's skin allergy and his
food allergies, and got my labrador enough energy to where
you could have a normal sized meal and be gaining weight,
then we knew we were really onto something, and we
began working on scaling the machines that we the prototype
(06:15):
machines down to the smallest that they could be and
be really effective and make a decent size batch quickly.
And that's where we where we settled with the current
chef Paal machine making six pounds and forty minutes.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Okay, we're going to talk more about how it actually
works and the app on our second half, but a
few more questions, So thank you. That was great information
on how it came about. What if you buy fresh
food but your dog doesn't have allergies, is not super
active because most dogs are not too active, but some are,
(06:51):
but most are not. So for the average dog at home,
what is the benefit of making your own dog food
versus says, Let's take it a step further, say you're
not buying fresh versus canned and dry food together. A
lot of people do wet food, some do wet and
dry viewer, I think, from my experience, do just dry.
(07:14):
So what are the benefits just making your own food
versus buying canned and everything? I mean, prices have gone
up for dog food like double in the last three years.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about it. That's what
that was. The second motivator behind it was the price.
I was spending over one thousand dollars a month for
two average sized dogs and that was really bad.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
And I mean for fresh food though, right.
Speaker 5 (07:38):
Yeah, yeah, And all that aside, the first real benefit
is their poops, their poops becoming easy to pick up.
I'm sure a lot of pet parents out there have
encountered the horrible situation where you switch to a new food,
whether it's fresh or dry or canned, and their bowels
don't react to it well and it makes an absolute mess.
(07:59):
And especially if you have more than one dog, then
the first dog makes a mess, the second dog steps
in it, and then you're just it's just chaos. So yeah,
So that is one of the things we're very proud
of is with our recipes, dogs get perfect poops right
off the bat. There's little to no transition that's needed
(08:19):
to go from dry food or can food over to
our recipes, and that is that's one of my favorite
things about it really that I don't have to the
messes that I've avoided.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
So wait, so if there's good poops, that means that
they're digesting it without a lot of issues.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Oh yeah, thanks for bringing that up. That was the
other thing that I noticed too, is hands down, fresh
food was better than all the drying can foods out there.
I was noticing that no matter how expensive of fresh
foods I was buying, the dogs were having irregular bowel
movements and you could see half of the ingredients in
(09:01):
their poop undigested because it's either undercooked or two larger
pieces were not you know, cud into small enough pieces. Yeah,
so it was. It was. It was a combination of
spending one thousand dollars a month on the best store
bought dog food that I could get, plus seeing them
making a mess of you know, when they're when they're
they're pooping everywhere, and then seeing that they're not digesting
(09:22):
a lot of those ingredients that I'm paying top dollar for.
And so part of the original mission with the chef
PA was make sure make sure that it's you know,
it's not enough to just have fresh food. It needs
to be cooked perfectly and you know, so that it's
so that it's digestible. And the flip side of that
is it's got to be not overcooked. So many, so
(09:43):
many of the foods out there are are are overcooked,
whether it's fresh or I mean kibble by definition is
is overcooked. But a lot of the fresh foods out there,
and when people make homemade foods too, they they tend
to overcook it and that that comes with its own
set of problems.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Let me ask you this, what about raw which I'm
going to try to keep my opinion out of that,
but I'm passionate about my opinion on raw food. But
what about raw, Because I've heard that a lot of
guests recently and learned a lot about raw, and a
lot of people think raw is the way to go.
(10:20):
But you know, Chef Paup cooks the food.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
Yeah, that's a good point. We cook at a very
low temperature. So I think the raw diet is great.
It's really great. It's a tremendous improvement, and I really
applaud people that try it. But for every five people
that we've talked to who say that they are on
the raw diet and they really like it, we come
across ten people who say that they tried the raw
(10:46):
diet and had a horrible experience with it, And that
horrible experience usually winds up at some point being like
a salmonilla contamination that gets either the dog very sick
or their children very sick. And so basically the Chef
Paw recipes in the machine, it's designed to take all
the benefits of raw and just cook it just enough
(11:09):
so that you've sanitized it and eliminated any harmful bacteria.
And to that end, people still said, there are a
lot of people that would say, hey, you know, any
cooking at all is going to destroy nutrients.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
That's not true.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
Well, yeah, on some level, as you heat there are
things that will break down. But to prove that once
and for all, a few months ago, we sent in
samples of our primary recipe. Well we have forty recipes,
but our recipe number one, we sent it in to
get tested. We made one batch of it with our machine,
(11:44):
but we didn't cook it, and we just blended it.
Our machine has many different speeds. It can mix really
gently and make it chunky, or you can turn up
the mixing speed and blend it to a complete pure
if needed. So we took one batch and just blended it,
no heat, no cooking whatsoever, and sent that in for testing,
and then made an identical batch and blended it up
(12:04):
just as much, but cooked it at the normal chef
Pac cooking temperatures, which is one hundred c or two
hundred and twelve degrees fahrenheit. And what happens is when
it's cooked in the chef Pal machine, the food is
really only encountering temperatures that are above about one hundred
and sixty fahrenheit for the last ten minutes of the
cooking cycle, So the food's only encountering low temperature cooking
(12:29):
only for a few minutes toward the end of the
cooking cycle, and it's just enough to soften things like
carrots and sweet potatoes and rice, but it's not enough
to break down nutrients. And so we sent in the
second sample of the cooked and blended recipe. We were
surprised to find that I expected to find at least
a little bit of a breakdown. There was virtually none.
(12:50):
There was less than two percent moisture loss from the cooking,
and there was virtually no caloric loss. There were even
things like some carbohydrates were increased because starches were converted
over and you know, we tested for zinc amounts and
adine amounts and vitamins and all that, and it didn't
break down. There was no appreciable, no statistically appreciable breakdown
(13:15):
when of any of the nutrients when you cook with
our chef Pal machine.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
So I was right. I love to be right, but
I didn't really know that I was right. But I
understand what you're saying, and you hit on it when
you said about raw That's one thing that bothers me
is that there's bacteria in law. So I'm not discounting law,
but there's bacteria, so you have to be aware of that. Yeah,
we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back, Molly.
(13:43):
Here's your dinner. See that's not your food down.
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Speaker 4 (14:33):
Let's talk past it.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Let's done.
Speaker 7 (14:35):
Pet Headline Radio, catlve Radio dot com.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Welcome back everyone. We're talking to Matt Tarrell. He is
the co founder and CEO of operations for Chef Paul.
We had a very lively first part of the show,
and I'm excited to get onto this second part. So
we talked about the importance of Chef pa You know
what it does the like cooking for the nutritional benefits
(15:09):
are there there, they're just it seems like there's not
much of a difference between raw and the Chef pau cooking.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
Yeah, just no, there's no. It's all the benefits of raw,
but none of the risk of equal.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Eye very good. Is it similar to okay, just so
people have an idea. I haven't even red meat in
more decades than I want to say, but is it
similar to like maybe a rare steak where it's cooked
a little bit so that it's safer to eat, but
it's still what would be a good visual as far
(15:43):
as how lightly it's cooked.
Speaker 5 (15:45):
Well, that all depends on what mixing speed you select,
and there's four different cooking mixing speeds to choose from.
The first one is very gentle. It rotates very slowly,
you know, maybe like ten rpm. And the rotating blades
they're sharp on one side and dull on the other.
And so what the basic number one speed setting does
(16:09):
is it rotates in the toward the sharp blade direction.
For thirty seconds, and so it's doing it's doing very
minor chopped chopping and cutting and doing it slowly, and
then every thirty seconds it stops and it reverses its
direction and so now the dul the dull side of
the of the mixing blade is pushing the food and
(16:29):
so there's no cutting there. It's just mixing everything around.
So that has the effect of distributing the heat evenly
across all the foods. So it's not going to be
like a steak that's that's even though it's even though
it's low temp, it's not quite analogous to a steak
that's cooked rare because you know, the steak's not getting
(16:51):
cooked from the inside out. It's getting for most cooking methods.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
That's my analogy. Okay, what was similar to.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
It would be it would be similar to more like
more like ground beef in a stew. The main part
of it is to is to make sure everything is
cooked evenly, and most pets really like like chunky foods,
so we really designed the machine to cook at the
lowest temperature possible and just get everything evenly cooked. I'm
(17:24):
sure people that have tried cooking homemade before with like
a pressure cooker or an instapot. They've noticed that the
food on the on the outsides of the bowl will
be cooked, but then the food in the center is
not cooked because there's no mixing going on in those devices.
So yeah, fortunately blenders don't cook and instapots don't mix.
(17:46):
And so we've we've done the chef Pause. Primary primary
achievement is to is to combine both of those mixing
and cooking into one machine. But it's not that's not
enough to to get a success full batch reliably without
having to put a lot of thought into it. And
that's where the chef Pot app that we developed comes in.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
I'm sorry to cut you off, it's exactly what I
was going to ask you about. How does the app work?
Because there's recipes in the app. There's some focus on
from the recipes on allergy, on nutrition, on renal health,
on if you need low calorie.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
Oh yeah, We've come up with a lot of recipes
and they're all inspired by either my own pets, my
family's pets, and our customers calling in and having a request.
And I'm one hundred percent certain that we're going to
keep rolling out new recipes. You know, I would be.
I'm going to be surprised if this time next year
we don't have a couple hundred recipes in the app.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
I think you'll ever have it recipes for cats?
Speaker 5 (18:47):
Oh yeah. In fact, people have been asking us that
every single day. And the reason why I haven't released
that yet is because the cats are formulating a homemade
recipe for a cat is a little more complicated than
than for dogs, or for humans or any other pets really,
So we wanted to have we we wanted to have more.
(19:10):
We wanted to have more nutritionists and veterinarians give their
feedback on what that would need to be. And there's
a kind of a universal sentiment amongst the nutritionists and
the veterinarians that unlike the wide variety of dog recipes
that we have for cats, it needs to be just
(19:31):
a much narrower set just too. So we've been we've
been working on it, and we just we actually just
coincidentally sealed the deal with a with a board certified
nutritionists to sign up to sign off and uh and
finalize to cat recipes. And we already many months ago,
(19:52):
we already finished the on the back end of the
software and the app we created the ability to add
more species, and so it's all I have to do
is flip a switch and cats will be will be
an option on there where. Yeah, within just a couple
of weeks, we're going to have the first the first
two cat recipes turned on and everyone will be able
(20:13):
to use that.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
I can't wait.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
Thanks, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
I tested Chef Paul, but my dogs are in doggy Heaven,
so I had to test it for my nephew dog, Charlie,
and for Tilly, my friend dog. So but cats, and
my cats eat everything, even Lettuce. Dennis likes Lettuce. I
don't get that.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
All right.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
So earlier when we were first talking, Matt, you mentioned
you can click six pounds of food in forty minutes.
I don't think my dogs ate nearly that much in
a day. What is the average, isn't it like? What
is the average sized portion?
Speaker 5 (20:55):
Well, the average sized portion I would probably be best
to find by what the NRC calls at. What the
all the NRC nutritional standards revolve around. And that's a
thirty three pound dog eating a thousand calories a day.
I don't know off the top of my head how
many that how many cups that is, But that's at
(21:18):
least a week of food for the average dog.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
So this is easier than going to the store. I
mean you have to get the store to buy the ingredients,
but then for a week, and is it best to
have it frozen or is it best to just you
can keep it fresh in your fridge for a week.
Speaker 5 (21:33):
Yeah, there's such a wide variety of applications. There's a
lot of people that have small dogs where the six
pound batch would last a month, and so that's it's
kind of excessive for them, and so they really ought
to select the half batch option in the app. And
that and because the app gives you regardless of what
batch size you choose, the app gives you, well, let
(21:55):
me say, regardless of which batch size you choose, and
regardless of which recipe you choose, the app gives you
step by step instructions on which ingredients to add and
how much to the machine. And so a lot of
people that have really small dogs, they opt to do
the half batch option. And that half batch option will
make three point one or three point two pounds in
(22:16):
twenty minutes, sometimes twenty five, but it basically and double
the speed there's a lot of other people who want
even more that have have much larger dogs, and so
they opt to do batches back to back and then
refrigerate the portions. There's actually people a lot of people
don't know this, but there's actually a lot of benefit
(22:38):
to cooling the food all the way down to refrigeration
temperature before before reserving it. There's a like, for example, rice,
when you when you cook it fully and then refrigerate
it down, the starches get converted into what's called a
resistance starch, and so that the resistance starches feed the
(23:00):
good gut bacteria and tend to reduce insulin spikes. Besides that,
we never want to feed our dog's food that's too hot,
so it's it's always best to refrigerate first before serving
it to them. And if you have excess food for
your dog, made nexcess number of batches, or you have
a small dog, it's completely fine to freeze that the food.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Also okay freezing it and then okay, so in there's
detha and there you go. Okay, So it's basically as
easy as looking at the recipe, buying the ingredients.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
Yeah, and we've actually planned to take it a step
further than that and make it even easier. You may
have noticed in the app there's a when you select
a recipe, there's a button called grocery list, and if
you select that, it gives you a simple grocery list
with checkboxes next to each ingredient and a description of
(23:54):
how much the how much of each ingredient is needed
in turn of grams or ounces or pounds, because you know,
some some things in the store are sold in out sizes,
others are sold in in pound sizes, so makes makes
everything really really streamlined there. And we're not stopping at
(24:15):
that though. We're planning on combining that grocery list function
with same day delivery network such as Smart and Final
or like Misfit Foods.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
UH.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
We're we've been we're reaching out to UH to those
to those companies to get that arrangement done. But we've
already laid all of the infrastructure for it on the
on the back end in the app. It's ready to go.
All we have to do is just get a same
day fulfillment grocery store to let us send customers to them.
We don't we're not even gonna take a cut of
(24:53):
it in any way, we just want our customers to
have the easiest way to fulfill their grocery list at home.
So it would be ideal if you don't even have
to go to the grocery store. You just open up
the app, select which rescue you want to make, select
the grocery list, and then tap and then select which
(25:16):
ingredients you're short of, and then export that over to
the Smart and Final or the same day delivery network
and then arrise at your door.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Can't beat that. Okay, we have a couple more minutes.
Let's talk about cost, because I know my listeners and
I'm sure people are listening and saying this sounds good,
but it's probably going to cost a fortune. So I'm
a big believer in how cost effective something is, because
there are times I will buy something that's inexpensive and
(25:49):
I use it once or twice and it goes in
the garbage or it fails me, so what's the point.
But sometimes if you spend the money on something, the
effectiveness is worth it. So oh yeah, what's the cost
of the chef paw.
Speaker 5 (26:03):
Well, the upfront cost of the chef paw on sale
is going to be five ninety nine right now, and
we also have the it's a firm payment method where
you can break that down into monthly payments of I
believe forty nine dollars. But it pays for itself incredibly fast.
(26:24):
In my in my circumstance with just a labrador and
a bulldog, even if I didn't own the company and
I wasn't the inventor of this and I was just
buying it at full retail price, it would pay for
itself because, like I said, I was spending one thousand
dollars a month of just food. I don't want to
say the name of the company. I was spending one
thousand dollars a month and on what I felt was
(26:45):
the best possible store bought food and having and still
having a major problem with it. In my specific case,
it pays for itself in just a few weeks. The
average person, it pays for it's the machine would pay
for itself in a few months the average.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
So, say, if it's somebody that really wants to do,
you know, something different for their dogs, they're going from
canned to fresh, so probably for can they were probably
spending cost of groceries today, probably about we'll say a
forty pound dog close to the thirty three, probably about
(27:21):
what forty bucks a month.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
Well, yeah, I really like that. There's one common denominator
behind all the dog foods and the regular foods and
what we're used to, and that's cost per pound. I
really like breaking everything down into cost per pound. That
way you can have in apples for apples comparison of
all the different food options. So the average kibble is
going to cost about a dollar a pound. The best
(27:44):
kibble can get up to about a dollar fifty or
even two dollars a pound. Canned food gets a little
it starts out a little bit higher than that. But
fresh door bought food you can't you can't really find
it for under two dollars a pound. And the average
average door bought fresh food's going up to four or five.
Some of them are even ten to twenty dollars a pound.
And we're not talking about like some exotic venison or
(28:07):
you know, some tuna. It's it's it's just just store
abought dog food.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, I recomment because you didn't say the name. I'm
not going to say any names either, But when you
said one thousand a month for people that are listening,
that are going really This was about a year ago,
and I saw a dog food that this is when
mister Z was still around, you know, was longer than
this was for Nicky. Sorry. So I was looking at
this brand and what it would cost. And this is
(28:34):
for a thirteen pound dog. He was thirteen or fourteen pounds.
It was close to three hundred for one. That was
a couple of years or so ago. So I you
A thousand dollars is not yeah.
Speaker 5 (28:47):
And it doesn't start it didn't start out at one
thousand dollars per month. All these fresh food companies, they
they give you deals to get you in and then
it's not. It's not until like a month into it
and you're you know, your dog's used to that food.
And then they they the discounts and the deal stop
and you get the real price. And the real price
is always shocking, and they do a really good job
(29:10):
of not of obfuscating what the cost per pound is.
They'll say, oh, we're gonna we're gonna be sending you
there are twelve meals for fifty nine dollars. And then
you know, if you're like, wait a minute, each meal
is is a couple ounces, so you're talking a few pounds,
like you know, and then then wait, wait, then all
of a sudden you realize, wait a minute, I just
paid fifty nine dollars for three pounds of food. It's
(29:34):
it's we get that a lot from our customers, and
really the only way is that is to look at
it as cost per pound and so on. In our
app the when you select a recipe, it shows you
what the average cost is going to be. And you know,
obviously we can't we're not quoting. We can't tell you
what the price is exactly going to be because it
depends on what story you're going to. But we show
(29:56):
the average price in there. And now the average price
for our for our our recipes is in the two
dollars range. We have some we want to be extending
chef pa into working with shelters and getting shelter dogs
to be able to have good quality, fresh dog food
that is free of all the typical allergies. So we're
(30:16):
to have the best possible reaction to the widest variety
of dogs. And to that end, we needed to make
up really affordable recipes specifically for shelters. We call it
the Econ Dog Recipe set. I have four different econ
dog recipes that we've made. They are down to they're
under a dollar fifty a pound.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Wow, how about lasting? You know, because someone people listening
and I'd say, wow, six hundred dollars and you're going
to give me a good honest stance over this. How
durable is chef pa.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
The original two prototypes of the current machine that we're
selling right now. I've been using it myself for two
and a half years and trying everything I could to
find a way to break it. I use it, I
use outdoor in my front yard when it rains. I
do I you know, I do, I do. I'll do
all kinds of things to get it, to get them
to break. They haven't. We have a two year warranty
(31:09):
on the machine, and in another year from now, if
things keep going on this track, we'll probably expend extend
it out to a three year warranty. But I'm very,
very confident that that two year warranty is going to
be plenty of make plenty of sense for us, and
we're keeping our return rate and our warranty rate under
(31:30):
one percent. So it's yeah, it's really it's really phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
So is that available on your website or on the app.
Speaker 5 (31:37):
There's information available on that on the website and in
the app. When people select recipes, they can choose between
our forty different suggested recipes. They can customize those recipes
themselves in any way that they want. And then there's
community inspired recipes, So anyone who makes their own recipe
in our app or customizes one of our recipes in
(31:57):
the app, they have the ability to share with the community.
And then it goes into community inspired recipes. And then
the fourth option is custom veterinary created recipes, so you
can those people. If you select that, you can reach
out to our nutritionists and have a recipe made specifically
(32:18):
just for your pets conditions.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
That's fantastic. Where can people buy chef.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Pa chefpad dot com. If you google dog food Maker,
you will come up at the top there because there's
nothing else like it, but chefpad dot com is the
best way.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
It's incredible and I'm more of a baker than a cook,
and it was easy, so easy to use. Matt, I
want to thank you so much for coming on Best
Bets for Pets. I wish you amazing success with chef Paul.
Speaker 5 (32:43):
Thank you so much. It was great being here, great
talking to you.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Great talking to you too. Hey everyone, I hope you
enjoyed the show. Please be sure to check out chefpad
dot com. This is phenomenal if you feed your dog
fresh food, if you feed your dog, which of course
all of you do, right, so check this out. This
is a great product. Yes, the cost upfront is a
little high, but it is well worth it and very
(33:09):
cost effective. So chefpod dot com. Thanks to my guest
Matt for coming on Best Bets for Pets, and thanks
to my testers Charlie and Tillie. They had a great
time eating what I created. And I'm not a good cook,
I'm okay, but it was so simple to make so
I had a great time. So check it out chefpod
(33:31):
dot com. So thanks again to my testers, Thanks to
my feline crew Dennis, Molly and Charlotte. I will be
testing some cat recipes at some point that you guys
will get to try out. Thanks to everyone listening to
Best Bets for Pets. I really appreciate your time. And
thanks to my producer, Mark Winter for working a magic
(33:53):
and making me and my guests sound amazing. Now remember
keep listening. You never know what We're going to have
next on Best Bets for Pets.
Speaker 4 (34:01):
Let's Talk Pets every week on demand only on Petlifradio
dot com
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