Caroline Buck

No.

I spent most of my career in tech.

I've been in the Bay Area for my entire adult life.

I worked at lots of startups.

I saw lots of entrepreneurs up close.

It took me a long time to want to create something myself, but it came out of a need and a desire for a product.

Someone who wasn't buying meat for myself was still buying a 20-pound bag of mostly processed animal products every couple of weeks for my dogs, and it felt really incongruous.

Vets have been prescribing vegetarian dog food for decades to manage allergies.

The most common allergies to dogs, kind of strangely compared to humans, is chicken and beef.

So it's not new, but I couldn't find something that felt like it was a similar quality level to what I'd been feeding before.

So it started out in my husband and I making it ourselves in small batches.

When you realize how much dog food you have to make, that gets hairy quickly.

And it took us a long time to make something that we felt really excited and confident about.

We make our food in a bakery.

So it's not kibble.

It's made the way like a treat would be made traditionally in an oven.

So my question, plant-based dog food is obviously polarizing and it takes a few minutes to get grounded in what we're doing and why.

And my instinct as a marketer has always been to just be super transparent and let the evidence, let the science do the work.

But I think the controversy of the category, it can spark a lot of conversation and curiosity, but it can also bring some outrage, especially in the world of running online ads or social media.

So my question is, as a brand, how do you feed that curiosity without triggering the outrage?