It started with a terrier who stopped eating.
Dill was eleven, she had gone off every food in the shop, and the vet had run out of suggestions. Tom started cooking for her. Nessa, who formulates pet food for a living, pointed out that home cooking is nutritionally a minefield. So they did it properly.
Why only one food
Nessa spent nine years inside a large pet food group. She watched the same base recipe get repackaged as puppy, senior, sensitive, light, indoor, hairball and grain free, with the differences amounting to a change in the vitamin premix and a new photograph on the label.
The lesson she took from it was that choice in this category is mostly theatre. A dog does not need six life stage formulas, it needs the right amount of a good one. So Snaffle makes a single complete food, in five recipes that differ where it actually matters, which is the protein.
The trade off is real. If your dog is bored of chicken, beef and turkey, we have nothing else for you. We would rather say that than invent a fourth thing to sell you.
Where we got to
Started
Four recipes, one kettle, a hundred and twelve customers who mostly knew us.
Moved to Corve Mill
Out of the unit behind the pub and into a proper kitchen with a retort of our own.
Turkey & Pumpkin
The fifth recipe, and the first one both species can eat. Suggested by a customer with three cats and a lurcher.
Households now
Six people in the kitchen, two on the phones, and no plans to make a sixth recipe.
The vet
Dr Aoife Kelleher MRCVS signed off all five recipes against FEDIAF guidelines and reviews them once a year. She is not an employee and she is not on the label of anything else. When she says a number needs to change, it changes.
Dill
Fifteen now, deaf as a post, still eating. She has her own tin every morning and she still does not like being photographed. If you meet Tom at a show she will be under the table.