 Aloha and welcome to Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday at 2 o'clock in the studios of located in the Pioneer Plaza in downtown Hololulu and the ThinkTech studios is as you would think very high-tech and we got some great technicians here that's gonna help us today. We've got two very interesting guests. Gary, an OSL, has actually been on ThinkTech Hawaii show about a month ago and we're gonna dive into a little bit more details on what his company is and how very beneficial it is to some of our best friends here in Hawaii, the dog community. So Gary is the CEO of Raw Dog and we've got the director of sales who's a very charismatic person. We're gonna try to control her a little bit today because she talks so much and gets so excited but Irma Baptiste is gonna be joining us today. So Irma, Gary, it's so great to have you here today. Welcome. Thanks for having us, Reg. All right. You know, just to get this started, Gary, you've, you came to Hawaii how long ago? We've been here about four and a half years. Four and a half years and you got started with Raw Dog right at that time or? Well, for the first couple months, you know, I pursued the traditional job market and once I realized that that wasn't my passion and there was no good quality raw dog food, I started to make my own raw dog food for my dog and that's how I got started in this. So you kind of did this out of an active love for your own family member? Kind of an active necessity but yeah, totally an active love. Very good. And so you basically started this from scratch. It was something that you kind of learned along the way? Yeah, I've been feeding raw for several years, knew the benefits of it when we came here. I was actually surprised with the quality of proteins and vegetables that we have in the island that nobody was doing this. So, you know, starting to meet farmers and ranchers and, you know, building our sources of ingredients. Yeah, we started from very small to where we are today. Very good. And Irma, you've kind of helped with that process. I mean, Raw Dog is in a variety of different locations now, right? It is. Raw Dog is in a variety of local locations on island and we are growing, which is always wonderful. And the direct result that you see, the impact that it has on the dogs is you see it within weeks and there's just no comparison. Right. And, you know, I know I've heard the story before and it's always very impressive. But, you know, Gary, you've got an interesting story to tell about, you know, how significant the ingredients that you have can really impact the life and the health of the animal, the dog. Right. The ingredients that we chose to use are all human-grade ingredients. All our ingredients are organic, grass-fed beef, all from Hawaii. We also use venison, which is an invasive species here. So, we work with conservation groups to bring that in for our product. And that's a controlled process. So, you know, and nobody should have any issues with that? No. Nobody should have any issues that actually comes out of a USDA facility before we get it. So, it meets the standards for human consumption. We just happen to make it for dogs. See, so it's very high levels of standard. You know, standards are set very high. And so, this has got to be one of the best quality products on the market, is it not? You know, we did a little bit of research into mainland companies because I was curious if there were others that produced food the way that we do. And, you know, we found some really good raw companies on the mainland, but none that have the quality of ingredients that we do, and certainly none that come from Hawaii. We benefit from the organic soil here. So, our animals that eat the wild grasses and our farmers who grow in these soils, we see enormous benefit, mineral content, vitamin content that I don't think you're going to find on the mainland. So, actually, I guess what I'm hearing is that, you know, because of the richness of our soil and the animals that eat that soil that we use to make the raw dog food itself, they're really healthy to begin with, and that just makes for a much more healthier product that you're manufacturing. Sure. I mean, you are what you eat, so if you use the best ingredients that you can, the end result is going to benefit the human or the animal. Right. And I know we've had, you know, some examples of some, you know, before and after pictures, and they're dramatic. You've got those on your website, too, don't you? We do. All right, so there's a lot of information on your website, actually, before and after pictures, as well as more information about the product, and that's, can they buy the product from the website? Sure. We have the ability to buy the product from the website, and we ship directly to people's homes, and that's on all the islands. We also have nine retailers that carry our product, most are on a Wahoo, one on Maui, and they all carry all our product lines. Right. And Irma, you've got some good stories, too, that you have a personal pet that you have that uses the product. I do. So we have two rescues, two rescue dogs, and Lenin, who is about four, he's going to be four in the spring, so I guess he's three and a half, we, he was actually born behind a trash can, he was one of five puppies, but only two survived, and he just had severe mange, so severe that there was no fur, if any. So a hairless dog, basically. He looked hairless, he did, and he was so weak, even more so than the visual appearance, he was weak, he couldn't even shake, he couldn't, you know, scratch, and they kept, you know, the place that we did rescue him from was giving him different kinds of kibble, and dogs have a challenge with digesting that type of food, it wasn't raw, and so finally after numerous vet visits, we decided to switch him to raw, raw dog, and they, it was at the farmer's market in Pro-Ridge, where we would purchase it. Suddenly we saw improvements, not just in his fur, but in his energy level, he became that perpetual puppy all over again, and even at age three and a half, four now, he still has that, that fervor, that excitement, and that what dogs should really have and embody. And he's got his fur back? He's got so much fur, even the vet is amazed, because his mom also has the same condition, but his mom is not on raw dog food, so she frequents the vet a bit more. He just goes in for his annual checkup and visits, says, sells hello, and always leaves with a clean bill of health, and we attribute that 1,000% to raw dog. Very good, and so as a result of that experience, you've got a special place in your heart for raw dog. Absolutely, because we saw the tangible impact, and so when we got our next rescue, I mean it was a no-brainer, and this dog is a Rhodesian ridgeback mix, so he was supposed to be bigger. When we did rescue him, he was fairly weak, and the vet had instructed or suggested for us to use this certain type of kibble, and I said, well you know the other dogs are already on raw, and he's like, well okay, we'll see, but he's fabulous, I mean, well he's cute and maybe I'm biased, but there's no health issue at all with him. He has not had to go, I mean he's not yet a year, but he's no need to go to the vet for anything. I'm curious, you know, I mean I hear all the good stories about raw dog food, and raw dog itself, and and how it really improves the health. Why are not the veterinarians on board with this? What's their reluctance? Do you have any idea? Well, I have a couple. First, I don't think any veterinarian gets into the veterinary because they don't love dogs or animals. What it comes down to is veterinarians tend to be in the sick care business. They do surgeries, they're excellent at diagnosis, but they don't have a dog come into their practice and say, let me come up with a plan for you, so you're going to have a healthy dog, and I never have to see you again. Kind of the preventative measures. Right. So they tend to be sick care providers, and we like to think of ourselves as wellness providers. So, but, you know, the overall health of the dog has got to be paramount. You know, they need to be concerned about that, and I would like to think that if this is good for the dog, and we've got proven results of that, that they should be more receptive to being able to, you know, suggest it or to go along with it, you know, especially with your experiences. I think, I think as long as there's, they see the visual and they see the tangible result of changing the diet to healthier, because it's, yes, it is a meat product, but there's also nutrients in there, like seasonal vegetables, which otherwise would not be, and so supplementing that, they get the nutrients that they would, even if they were out in the wild. When dogs are out in the wild, they will eat every three days and gorge, and what do they eat? Natural things, meats, vegetables, and they're fine, and they can exist in the wild. So, this is the exact same thing, it's just that now there are human fur children. Yeah. And what's interesting, one of the the pictures, I don't know why, but for some reason kind of sticks in my head, is the difference in the poop of a dog that's eating raw dog, and yes, well this is a family show. You know, but there's, it's interesting to see the difference between a dog that's on a regular type dog food, and one compared to a raw dog food. And I know we had a picture of that, I don't know if we're going to be able to call it up or not, but it was a significant difference. And, Gary, can you just speak, why, why does that happen? Yeah, it's actually pretty simple. Dogs lack two enzymes that humans have. One is an enzyme in the saliva that breaks down starches in the simple sugars. Without that enzyme, the sugars ferment in the stomach and they wind up producing the allergy symptoms that we know is Paul licking and chewing and ear infections and shedding and hot spots, rashes. Mange is another comment. We got a picture of it on the screen right now and you can see the one on the right is a normal dog food diet, and the one on the left is the raw dog food diet. This is actually my dog. He is a, unfortunately for him, a test dog, so I put him on kibble for a bit of time just so we could take a picture of the stool. And what you're seeing is undigested food, and it has a distinct bad smell to it because of the fermented starches. The one on the left is after a couple days back on raw and it's very tiny. So what that tells you is the ratio of food absorbability between raw and kibble. You have a very high food absorbability or bioavailability of the food on a raw diet and on a kibble based diet, you know, most of the time people are throwing 50% of their money out in their backyard. That's a good point. I guess the, there's also, I would imagine, a cleansing process that takes place so that the dog system itself, the digestive system is actually more healthy too. It is. All the dog systems become more healthy and more efficient over time. Dogs are one of the best self-healers on the planet. You provide them even a moderately nutritious food and you'll see the results of that food within a day or two energy levels come back and you very quickly start to see those allergy symptoms go away. You provide them a high quality food and that happens even quicker. How early should a dog get on this type of diet? Is there, you know, from birth? I mean, obviously after the nursing is over, but you know, I mean, the sooner the better. Yeah. In the wild, puppies will go on a raw diet as soon as they're done weaning. The process is their mother eats, you know, she will regurgitate and the puppies will eat that and get the benefit of the digestive enzymes of the mother with broken down food. But yeah, I've never met a dog in the wild that's mastered fire and their moms can't go out and grab a bag of puppy jobs. So, yeah, that's that's the transition. It's all natural. It's all natural. And what's interesting is that this is that this is all natural not only for the dog but also for Hawaii. I mean, we can do all of that here. It's a homegrown type of product. It is. Yeah, we, we hire locally. We pay taxes locally. We sell locally. We don't ship to the mainland. We try to help as many farmers and ranchers as we can. If they're not organic, we try to help them down the road to become organic. We buy their seconds which have bug holes possibly in some of the vegetation. Bug holes mean the bugs had a choice and they picked a vegetable which is higher in nutrition content because, you know, bugs aren't dumb. So, what we get is generally of higher quality than what you would find in a grocery store nutritionally speaking. Right. It's just, it's not visually appealing, but that's not an issue when you process the dog food. Not at all. Yeah, so that makes sense. When we get back, what I'd like to be able to do, and we're going to go on a short break here, but when we get back, I'd like to spend a little bit more time talking about how the dog food is actually processed and manufactured and I guess distributed and I guess, Irma, you get involved in a little bit of the sales efforts on that part and go to some of the trade shows and things like that. So, that'll be the second half of the show. But this is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here with the raw dog food company and we're going to be right back in about one minute. For a very healthy summer, watch Viva Hawaii. We're giving you the best tips and with our best health coach here. So, Viva Health Coach. Viva la comida saludable. Hi, my name is Justini Spiritu. This is my co-host Matthew Johnson. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. we host the Hawaii Food and Farmer series. This is the place you can come to for insight on the perspective and history and passions of Hawaii's farmers and all folks involved in Hawaii's local food system. What kind of folks do we have on? So, we have everyone from local farmers, we have foodies, chefs, we also have journalists, researchers, anyone who's actually working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So, join us every Thursday and tweet in the us and ask us some questions and leave your comments as well. Thank you. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here with Gary Noelle and Irma Baptiste from the Raw Dog Company, and we're talking a little bit about, you know, the company itself as well as the product that it sells and all of the very impressive results that that food has to help, I guess, dogs, our best friends, stay healthy and come back from some illness. And we actually have some before and after pictures that we're going to share with you that shows, you know, what the animal looked like before and then after going on a raw dog diet, what they look like now. And I'm going to ask Gary if maybe he can explain what some of these pictures are as they pop up. Sure. This is actually one of my friends dogs. You can see the picture on the left, red eyes. You see the expression of the dog, the second picture. This is three days. The eyes have cleared up. All the redness is gone. You see the posture change in the dog. This is something that is almost immediate when a dog is switched to raw dog food. And this is just a close-up of the inside of the eyes. You have a slight amount of eye infection on the left and on the right, gone in three days. You can even see the change in the eye color itself, not as red and turning back into its natural color state. Very good. And we might have another picture. Here we go. That's disturbing. This is disturbing. This is an intake photo of a dog named Neptune. And this is when we were doing our animal feeding trials at the Oahu SBCA. We had 26 dogs that were kind of the worst of the worst. We know that we see a lot of dogs coming in with mange. The second picture is after that had been taken care of the dog, servicing it for about a year. And this is the best they can do. You see the body languages still see open skin area. The next thing that follows after that is, you know, we put the dog on raw food. After a week, we started to see immediate hair regrowth, posture changes in the dog, stool reduction, and all the symptoms. The picture you're looking at is after five weeks, full hair and coat regrowth, all of the allergy symptoms were gone. This like had been at the Oahu SBCA for about a year and a half. And at the seven-week point, this dog was adopted. The reason is people don't want to adopt or reluctant to adopt a dog that looks like a medical bill. Right. And when they see something that looks like a family member, you're much more likely to have the dog adopted. And what you're seeing now is the family that did adopt it. And it's a significant difference from the first picture that we saw which was deserving to what it is now. I mean that's, you wouldn't even know it's the same dog. No. And you know, I see these changes frequently. This was the one I think that really touched my heart the most because you see a lot of dogs in shelters with mange and the treatments that they're given have no possibility of solving it. It's something very easy to solve in nutrition. Now are the the shelters that the dogs go to, are they able to provide your product? One of the things that we find is some of the shelters have agreements with large kibble pet food companies. So part of that contractor agreement is they be the only provider of raw dog food. The Hawaii Mane Society on the Big Island, I just found this out and it's very disturbing to me that animals that come in with mange are immediately put on the unadoptable list and that leads to euthanization and I feel that most of those dogs can be fixed and very quickly if they have the capability and willingness to serve raw food to them. Wow. That's sad. Just out of curiosity to put it in context, at least for me, roughly to defeat a dog for a month, we're talking about a four-week period, but defeat a dog for a month with raw dog would cost about how much? I guess the size of the dog will help determine that a little bit, but for a medium-sized, average-sized dog? Well, you know, for a small dog, let's say it's a six-pound dog, we're looking at about $30 a month. You know, as you move up and weight, a 40-pound dog is, you know, right around $90 a month and then as you go up higher in weight, we also offer bulk packaging and some of our foods to reduce the monthly price. 80-pound dog, you might only be looking at about $110. The things that are gone are the dental cleanings, the allergies, all the antibiotics, the 10 special shampoos you probably have at home to try to get rid of the dog smell. The consistent shedding, which only happens, is supposed to happen every two weeks, not continuously 24 hours a day, so the cost is really offset. What I'm kind of leading up to, and I know this may come as a surprise, so this is a Reg Baker thought and I have these occasionally and some of them smell good and some of them don't, but I mean for a hundred bucks a month somebody could actually adopt a dog and provide them with the raw dog food and make a dog that's in a shelter healthy again. You know, if they aren't able to do it, you know, for budgetary reasons or contractual reasons, then somebody could maybe make a contribution to do that for them and the dog could get healthy again and become adoptable. Yep, that might be an interesting little program that somebody might want to think about. We saw that with Lenin though. When Lenin was at the OSPCA, he was just tucked in the corner. I mean he couldn't, you know, scratch himself. I mean dogs do that all the time. He is the most playful dog out of our three and we attributed it to his nutrition and he's getting all the nutrients that he needs, none of the excess that they don't need and so it's it's worth every penny that we invest. He's not having to go to the vet, we can take him out to the beach and go hiking, no problem, but we make sure that he is very much on raw dog. Sure, let's, we got a photo of a dog that went through a little bit of a personality change. I guess, this is Ruby and the Serong was just her mom's idea because she thought it was cute, not for any medical reasons. But you can see the brown around the muzzle, little sore on the nose, slightly overweight. The body language kind of shows it all, tired, you know, not what a five-year-old dog should look like. So after about a month on the food, well this is this is another picture of Ruby laying down so you can see her big bones, as we call them, but she's about 15 to 20 pounds overweight in this picture. Following a month on the food, you see a completely different posture, muzzle is now fully weight, the spot on the nose, she looks happy, she's smiling, she is, and you can actually see an abdomen as opposed to fat. She goes on runs now, she plays, whereas before, you know, sleeping was her favorite activity. And the soreness on the nose is gone? It's completely gone. Shedding is completely gone after 30 days. See, and that's my point, is that just having a 30-day diet of this can make a significant difference in the dog. So that's certainly worth adopting. For a hundred bucks, you can have a life-changing event take place. They're happy. You can't put a price on happy. I know that by the time somebody finds us, they've been through multiple vet visits, multiple medications, multiple shampoos. They've tried all sorts of things, and you know, here comes raw duck Hawaii saying we can fix that. We're not like vets, we're not like the big box stores, because I provided money back guarantee on every single thing we sell, because you've kind of already been, you know, through the ringer a few times, and you've paid a fair amount of money for it. So if it doesn't work for a customer, I'm not going to make them pay for dog food that doesn't work for them. So it's a hundred percent no questions, money back guarantee, you know, try it and see what happens. I don't think there's very many dog food manufacturers that will do that. Right. Oh, there certainly aren't very many vets that would do it, and I know there aren't very many dog food manufacturers that would do it. Well, and if you look at the ingredients on the back of every label, you know what's in there. I'm glad you brought that up. Can you spend just a minute or two on how the manufacturing process, how does this all work and how does it go through it, and you've got a plant here, right, in Kali. Yeah, we have a plant on King Street in Oahu. The process is similar to what's called the wild prey model. We use the whole animal, so it's not just the leftover parts after they've taken the parts for human consumption. We use whole chicken with whole organ meat. The cow we use the entire cow other than head, high hooves, feet, feathers, digestive tract. So not only is the dog getting, you know, the chuck steak and the flank steak, they're getting the filet mignon and, you know, the rib eye, and same with the deer. They're getting the whole animal, and the vegetation that they would normally get is in the stomach of the animal. It's already been broken down. They have digestive enzymes, chlorophyll available to them. So we do provide a few additives in the form of organic vegetables, but that's to make it a complete and balanced diet for the dog. So we're kind of one-upping the ancestral diet to make sure that it complies with today's standards for complete and balanced. Right, and so you get all this raw materials, and it comes into the manufacturing plant, and you run it through a processing machine. We run it through a few. First is to crush it down into small stew-sized pieces, and the carcasses or the chickens that we get completely frozen. So from the time we receive it until the time it's manufactured into the form factors you see here, it's never thought it never comes up above 23 degrees ever again. And we produce nuggets for smaller sized dogs, and we produce hamburger patties that are eight ounces. Our box now is 100% compostable. We are actually looking at a compostable shrink wrap for the patties on the inside because we are also INA friendly. We want to give back to the community and that's... And I guess what's on the screen now is some of the final, the finished product. I guess after it goes through the machine and it gets all sorted up and gets processed into the usable type of format, then it gets packaged and this is one of your double doors. Yep, this is one of our double doors. This is our friends at the public pet on Wiley Avenue and you can see our variety of flavors of nuggets on the top shelf, bones, green tripe, some of the bulk chubs on the left-hand side and then our four, five different flavors of food below that. Now, and I know we're running out of time and I apologize. We could talk about this for a while, but I just wanted you to have a minute to talk about the new product, the ahi product. It's just now coming out. I didn't know this, but apparently dogs really like to eat fish. Dogs really like to eat fish and fish is probably one of the healthiest proteins that they can get. Again, locally sourced. You know, line caught so it's sustainably harvested and comes to us frozen just like everything else and we produce... Here's a picture of what it looks like. Here's a picture of what it looks like and this particular flavor, the scent of the food, just drives dog, drives dog nuts. And I can smell it and I'm getting a little hungry too, so. It'll probably be one of the best foods you've ever eaten. It's very good. Well, like I said, I wish we had more time, but we've got to wrap up. Thank you both for being here today. Thank you for having us. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We air live every Thursday at two o'clock. We highlight companies and individuals that are successful in Hawaii. Looking forward to seeing you again hopefully next week.