“Our first banker was a woman, and presently our accountant, attorney, and CEO are all women. And just over half of her senior management team is female, which is typical for a woman-created enterprise. Of 155 employees, 98 are women – or 63 percent. Marie has implemented some other “non-traditional” activities in her female-dominated manufacturing operation. You’d be hard pressed to find a human food manufacturer that’s using such stringent food safety processes. “Nobody had ever considered using HPP on a pet food product before it was further processed.” In addition, Stella & Chewy’s has an independent lab test each batch to check for pathogens and they post the results on their website. coli and salmonella, using high pressure without diminishing the health benefits of raw ingredients. The ability to control all phases of her raw pet food operation led Marie, working with a leading food safety scientist, to develop an exclusive, patent-pending, food safety procedure called Hydrostatic High Pressure Process (HPP). Health and safety – for people and animals – became the primary focus. People were paying much more attention to where and how their pet food was manufactured.
Suddenly, many pet food manufacturers were facing product recalls because of contaminated ingredients sourced from China. In 2007, Marie relocated her family and opened a small manufacturing plant in Muskego, Wisconsin – a suburb of Milwaukee and her hometown, an area well known for food and beverage manufacturing. In the process, Marie attracted the interest of a young Wall Street trader who helped her in her delivery efforts as a part-time job on the side.
Stella and chewy driver#
During our meeting, she described hailing taxis with her boxes of frozen food stashed behind parked cars (because no taxi driver wants to pick up a fare hauling that sort of baggage). Then she had to market, sell and deliver the food to retailers in New York – all without owning a car. She purchased huge quantities of organic ingredients and several industrial freezers, which took up residence in her living room.
Now, nearly 10 years later, Stella & Chewy’s frozen and freeze-dried raw, natural dog and cat food is available in more than 3,000 retail stores nationwide.īut how did a young, single woman living on the Upper West Side, who didn’t even cook her own meals, start to tackle that project? Marie took it on with single-minded determination – and no shortage of obstacles. Her two dogs, Stella and Chewy, were early product testers. After relocating back to New York City and finding herself between jobs, she started preparing raw pet food in her Manhattan apartment. The more she learned, the more convinced she was that there were other pet parents like her who would want to feed their animals high-quality meals. Chewy’s rapid return to health inspired Marie to learn more about the benefits of feeding less processed, grain-free foods to animals. Following her veterinarian’s advice, she fed Chewy a homemade diet of raw meats and vegetables. While living in Los Angeles, Marie adopted Chewy, a rescue dog who was seriously ill.
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