This month, Doggy Grub celebrates 10 years in business, and somewhere across Australia, hundreds of dogs are eating Doggy Grub for dinner.
Some are puppies on their very first proper meal, some are seniors who've been eating it for years, some are in Perth or Brisbane or little towns we've never visited and probably couldn't find on a map without help.
We think about that a lot lately, because ten years ago we were parking our Saab around the corner from a stranger's house in Adelaide CBD, hoping she wouldn't look out the window and see us climb out of our personal car with an esky full of dog food.
That was our first delivery.
How Australia's First Doggy Grub Order Got Delivered in an Esky
We didn't have automated ordering back then — our first customer actually just sent us an email asking if she could buy some food for her dog, and we said yes immediately without even thinking of the logistics.
We cooked her order in our home kitchen the same way we were already cooking for our own dog, friends and family, packed it carefully into an esky, loaded it into the Saab, and drove into the city to drop it off ourselves. We parked around the corner so she wouldn't see what car we'd arrived in, Lachi carried the esky to her door, and tried to look like we'd done this a thousand times before. Meanwhile, I waited in the car, eager to know how it all went!
Why Two People Left Their Careers to Start a Dog Food Business
Before any of this, Lachi was a barista and I was a theatre nurse, and while we both genuinely loved our work, the hours were relentless in the way that shift work always is. We'd been talking for a while about wanting to build something of our own, something we could actually do together rather than alongside each other, we just hadn't figured out what that looked like yet.
And then Betty came into our lives and sort of answered the question for us.
We adopted her at five years old, a rescue who arrived carrying about 15 extra kilograms and what can only be described as an enormous personality. When we started feeding her real whole food instead of processed kibble, the difference was genuinely hard to ignore — she lost the weight, her energy changed, and her vet results kept coming back perfect every single time, which felt like the universe confirming we were onto something.
The Rescue Dog Who Proved That Real Food Changes Everything
Betty was our chief taste tester for years and we mean that completely seriously. She was curious about everything, never shied away from trying anything new, and had a particular and very committed obsession with crunchy fennel that still makes us laugh when we think about it. She really did show us that dogs can not only thrive on real food but genuinely enjoy it, have opinions about it, and get excited.
We lost her a few years ago at thirteen and a half — a brain tumour, which you're never prepared for no matter how much time you've had together. She was a rescue who honestly gave us so much more than we ever gave her, and everything we built was really built around her — her appetite, her good health, her ridiculous love of a crunchy vegetable. We think about her all the time.
What 10 Years of Running a Small Australian Dog Food Business Looks Like
A couple of years into the business we graduated from the Saab to our own delivery car and moved the cooking into a commercial kitchen, though we were still both working our day jobs at that point and doing all of this around the edges of everything else. On weekends Lachi would head out and do the Adelaide deliveries himself, getting to know the dogs and their people, door by door across the city.
That's where so many of our favourite memories live. Archie, one of our very first dogs visiting us at markets and still eating Doggy Grub to this day. Benji, a beautiful lab who'd run to the door with his favourite teddy every single delivery — he's since passed, but his owner now has a new puppy on Doggy Grub. Max and Zoe, two little griffons whose owner and us had the loveliest conversations about her beautiful garden, what was changing with the seasons, what was coming into bloom. People left Easter chocolates out on delivery weekends, toilet paper during COVID.
We were building a community of people who believed their dogs deserves better food!
The Scary Parts Nobody Tells You About Running a Small Business
Leaving our day jobs felt more exciting than frightening if we're honest. The harder leap came in 2021 when we decided to move to a manufacturer so we could create a shelf-stable product that could reach dogs all across Australia, not just Adelaide, and that people could actually take on adventures without needing a freezer.
It meant handing over the cooking we'd done entirely ourselves from day one, and that was genuinely difficult. What if it didn't taste the same? What if the texture changed? What if the dogs noticed? It was also a huge financial outlay, a big bet on something we couldn't fully supervise anymore.
And then in 2022 our manufacturer told us they couldn't continue with our packaging. It took well over a year to find a new one willing to work with us — most facilities won't make dog food using only human-grade ingredients, which we hadn't quite anticipated. We ran out of stock, couldn't honour orders, and watched an export opportunity we'd worked hard toward disappear while we waited. There were stretches of that period where it genuinely felt like the ground had dropped out.
But most of our customers stayed. They waited, kept coming back, and we will never forget that. We're with a new manufacturer now, things are looking bright again, and we're still here after ten years — which some days feels like the most remarkable thing of all.
Here's to the next ten, and to all the dogs and their people who'll make it worth it.
With love, Candice & Lachi 🐾
