We're finally
making it.

While the limited-ingredient recipes stay rooted in our ancestral, whole-food approach, I've also been working on another version with a different goal: making real food more affordable for more dogs.

That means being honest about cost. Every shelf-stable food uses ingredients that help make the recipe financially possible. The question is not whether an ingredient lowers cost—it's whether it still brings enough nutritional and functional value to deserve a place in the bowl.

After looking at pumpkin, sweet potato, lentils, oats, barley, and millet, we kept coming back to millet. It is naturally gluten-free, does not artificially inflate protein the way legumes can, and lets meat remain the star of the recipe.

But choosing the ingredient is only the first step. We're now testing how to prepare it well—from soaking and sprouting to fermentation and gentle cooking—to improve digestibility while keeping the food truly accessible.

I'll share what we learn as we test. This is the part where curiosity, practicality, and our standards all have to work together.

The limited-ingredient complete-and-balanced recipes are formulated, but there is still important work before launch.

We're dialing in texture, finalizing packaging, confirming feeding guidelines, and preparing to send samples to a larger group of product testers. This is the stage where all the details come together: how the food looks, feels, smells, stores, and—most importantly—how dogs respond to it.

We're also getting ready to share these recipes with retailers and introduce them at SuperZoo.

Thank you for being part of this process. Your feedback has helped shape the food at every turn, and we can't wait to hear what your dogs think of the next round of samples.

A big milestone: lamb ears are now in the formulation database, so we reran all four of our primary protein recipes—pork, chicken, turkey, and beef.

With the new data in place, each recipe meets complete-and-balanced nutritional requirements while also meeting the standards we set for ourselves:

• Liver stays below our internal 12% maximum.
• Omega-6 to omega-3 stays below 15:1.
• We maximize bone meal rather than relying on synthetic calcium.
• Every ingredient is a whole food.

We could have technically balanced these recipes without lamb ears. But adding them improves manganese and fiber while contributing protein, collagen, fat, cartilage, and fur—things that matter to us beyond what a formulation spreadsheet can capture.

The formulation work is officially complete. Now we get to make sure the finished food performs just as well in the real world.

Lamb ears have always been more than a chew to us. They bring fur for fiber, connective tissue and collagen, and nutrients that we believe contribute something meaningful to a dog's bowl.

The challenge: there was no lamb ear data in the formulation database we use. Until we could accurately account for it, we had to simulate its role with ingredients like chicken feet and psyllium husk.

So we sent our lamb ears to a third-party lab for a complete nutrient analysis and submitted the results for inclusion in the database.

The findings reinforced what we suspected: lamb ears contribute meaningful fiber and manganese, along with protein, fat, cartilage, and collagen. We also learned it contains more fat than expected, which matters when every ingredient contributes to the finished food's nutrition and calories.

This data will help us finalize the limited-ingredient recipes—and hopefully make it easier for other fresh feeders to account for lamb ears in their own bowls, too.

This month, we ran into a formulation challenge that made us stop and rethink the recipe.

One early complete-and-balanced model called for beef liver as the second ingredient—nearly half of the recipe. The software could make it work on paper, but it was not a food I felt good about feeding every day.

Liver is incredibly nutrient-dense, and it absolutely belongs in these recipes. But there's a difference between including liver thoughtfully and relying on it to do all the nutritional heavy lifting.

So we set our own standard: liver needs to stay within a level we're comfortable feeding long term, even if that means using more expensive ingredients such as oysters or mussels to help meet nutrient requirements.

We're not formulating for a spreadsheet. We're formulating for dogs.

Our ancestral meatball base already covers a lot nutritionally, especially because it includes organs and seafood. But as we formulate complete-and-balanced recipes, we're carefully addressing the nutrients that can be harder to provide consistently: iodine, zinc, magnesium, manganese, vitamins E and D, and omega-3s.

For our first pork and turkey recipes, we're testing purposeful whole-food additions including pumpkin seeds for zinc, sunflower seeds for vitamin E, and kelp for iodine.

We're also working through two important formulation changes: using bone meal for more consistent calcium levels as we scale, and finding the most accurate way to account for the fiber and structure that furred lamb ears bring to a recipe.

This is where the real work begins—every ingredient needs to earn its place.

I'm starting this food with the same ancestral foundation we've always believed in: muscle meat, bone, secreting organs, seafood, and fur.

The goal is to create two new versions of Real Dog food. First, a limited-ingredient recipe made entirely from whole foods—simple, intentional, and complete and balanced. Second, a more accessible recipe that brings the cost closer to kibble without losing the philosophy behind the food.

We're beginning with pork and turkey, and I want this process to be collaborative from the start. What matters most to you: ingredient simplicity, complete-and-balanced nutrition, texture, price, or something else?