How I turned my dog’s raw food diet into an $11.7 million pet brand

Katie Spies, 32, doesn’t know how she’ll live without a pet. In 2015, after graduating from MIT with a double major in mechanical and environmental engineering, she rescued George, a 6-month-old Italian greyhound. But when George’s first birthday came around, Spies didn’t have much reason to celebrate. Her “cheerful and lively” pup had become tired and lethargic. He was having seizures; medication wasn’t helping. Then a vet mentioned a raw food diet. Spies went to the supermarket to buy some ground beef and chicken liver, which she mixed with peas, carrots and berries. Within a day — she swears — George was happy to eat again, and soon his health had improved dramatically. At first, having George back was enough — until, as a student at Harvard Business School in 2019, Spies decided to stake her claim on the $18 billion raw, frozen and fresh dog food market.

When I got George, I was working for an agtech startup in the Bay Area—I’d always loved food systems. But when the George thing happened, it didn’t occur to me that you could turn it into a business. Plus, I’d always associated entrepreneurship with technology. So for the first few years, I was just doing it for George and my friends. I’d make the food in my kitchen and freeze it in ice cream tubs; my customers would pick it up on the weekends.

Before I started business school, I took a year to clear my head. I quit my job, started walking dogs, and met lots of people who bought my dog ​​food. I longed to make it more than just a side income, but I still didn’t see it as a business. I think I was obsessed with it for so long that I wasn’t willing to spend time on anything else.

At Harvard, we met in small groups to brainstorm business ideas. Inevitably, I started talking about pet food. Most of my classmates weren’t into it, so I started working on it myself. Then, in 2017, Farmer’s Dog came out. They sold cooked food but were very vocal about educating consumers, and I thought, “They’re stealing my idea!” During my second year at Harvard, I spent every waking minute working on this concept. I decided to name the brand Maev, after a larger-than-life Irish wolfhound I met while walking the dog.

We hit the ground running in New York City in 2019. We moved from my kitchen to a commercial kitchen. We hired an engineer, an operations manager, and a community manager. We reached out to meat and fruit suppliers for restaurants and hotels in the area. And we built up inventory and did little tasks to improve the product, even though it was pretty spot on when we launched. George and I had so much work behind us—what flavors do dogs like? What ingredients? What excites them?—and this really sped things up.

We knew we wanted to grow quickly. Venture capital made sense, but VCs usually look for unicorns, so I initially spent a lot of time thinking about how to achieve what VCs use to measure software companies as LTV to CAC – Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost. We decided to launch with a subscription model starting at $50 per 5-pound bag of frozen food. Most pet owners are used to buying subscriptions, and the fundamental economics are really compelling. A tech VC firm led our first round of funding in 2019; we raised $2.2 million.

We didn’t spend any money on marketing back then, but we did host a lot of events. If you show up at a park with a cooler full of dog food, it’s swarming with dogs and you can have interesting conversations. I wanted to be a brand that people liked enough to talk about, and that’s how our social following started – people from our community would organize their own events in Maev’s name.

In the spring of 2020, we built a website and that was the beginning of a real disaster. We rented our own commercial kitchen in New York and while my colleagues created slide decks, I thought about the most efficient way to cut meat and the importance of stirring peanut butter every hour. In 2021, we moved with five employees to Austin – a hub for consumer goods brands and a great talent pool for supply chain and marketing candidates.

Today, we have 20 employees and various partners who are much better at making food than I am. We moved away from a pure subscription model – lots of people wanting to place an order at once – and we set up four manufacturing sites and seven shipping facilities to enable Amazon-style one-day delivery. In 2023, we made $11.7 million in revenue.

George is 10 now. We have a dog-friendly office with Beta products everywhere – he’s always a taste tester. He lives large.