- Many people don’t know about their pets’ diets and how to provide a healthy, balanced meal for them.
- The main problem for pet owners when it comes to pet food is that there is a constant lack of nutritional food choices in the market.
- Petchef produces nutritionally-balanced food for dogs and cats with human grade ingredients brought at the local market.
Humans get to choose the food we eat but pets don’t. They have to eat whatever that is put in front of them.
As a responsible pet owner, picking the right pet food is not easy. Labels list ingredients and what percentages of a few nutrients are present, but they say little to nothing about quality.
Unfortunately, many pet food manufacturers cut costs by including low-quality ingredients in their products. Pet lover Martín Pérez from Petchef realised that this was a problem he wanted to fix, and he also wanted to address a much bigger picture.
“I love nature and I’m frustrated with the relations human nature—trashing, over-fishing, abusing natural resources, and the list goes on”
“We believe pets are ambassadors of the human-nature relationship. People who grow up with pets are more aware of nature and take care of it more.”
Petchef focuses on this problem by producing nutritionally-balanced food for pets as they believe that it is the core element for good health.
Furthermore, they prepare and deliver the food to you, enabling you to spend more time with your furry friends.
Lack Of Awareness
Although they are loving owners, many people don’t know about their pets’ diet and how to provide them a healthy balanced meal.
That was the main challenge that Martín and his team faced: people were not aware of what is good or bad for their pets to consume.
“People love their pets, but because they don’t know what to feed their pets they end up giving something that in the long run will make the pet fall sick more often, have more health issues and even live a shorter life.”
Thus they changed their approach by sharing what they know with people and teaching them what are the good practices they can explore or what they should avoid doing.
In the beginning they made many mistakes such as delivering orders later than expected and they had some issues with the size of chopped ingredients.
“Luckily nothing really serious and thanks to those mistakes now we stand stronger and we are doing better.”
However, they also received a lot of positive feedback from their customers.
“We have cases where the allergies stop or even other medical issues got way better, all thanks to a good nutrition.”
When the pets are healthier, owners will be happier too, which is what keeps Petchef going.
“We are also really grateful for our clients who, like us, love animals and they are really supportive providing their feedback and ideas to keep improving.”
A Day In The Life Of A Petchef
On a normal day the Petchef team is split into 3 units.
The first team is in charge of talking with pet owners about their experiences with their pets, and asking questions regarding what they are feeding them. “This is the team that gets to know all the stories about the pets and many cute pictures.”
The second team is the one getting the fresh ingredients, cooking and packing the meals. “[They are in charge of] making sure the food is great in terms of nutrition and taste.”
The third team is the one delivering the food to the clients. “This is the team that gets to meet the pets every day.”
The whole team has a common love for pets and everyone has pets of their own. Most of them are active in the community helping to rescue pets, adopting, or doing whatever they can to help.
Martín shared an example of one of his team members, Aidan.
“He used to be driving Uber for years. In the back of his car, he would bring a bag of pet food and between the trips, if he saw any animal in the street he will stop the car and feed him or her.”
Serving The Community
Their pricing starts at RM2.80 per meal for small pets and will be more for larger furbabies. This compares well to wet food options which tend to be more expensive and is approximately as expensive as premium kibble.
Since the business was established, Martín told us that Petchef has raked in about 6 figures in revenue (amounting to about 5 figures monthly) and has served more than 1000 pets.
For now they will focus their resources in Malaysia.
“[We want to] keep improving our service and our internal processes in order to keep serving our customers and serve them better every time.”
“Last month [in June], we grew 55%, and we are pushing hard to continue growing at a good speed, so to keep evolving our process, structure and service its something that is taking a big part of our time now.”
On the other hand, he also wants to concentrate on the community. Martín stated that once they are sustainable, they will start expanding.
“But the focus right now is to provide a great service, make a great product and build a strong community.”
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As a non-pet owner, who wishes to get dogs soon, Petchef sounds like a convenient choice to me if I owned any pets.
Firstly is because I wouldn’t know anything about feeding pets and I actually thought the kibble in the supermarket is more than enough to feed my pets.
Secondly, they prepare and deliver the food to you, it’s basically like a food delivery platform such as dahmakan but for pets.
I now personally believe that pets should enjoy eating healthy food themselves as much as we do. As Martín said “We believe that change starts with us, with our families at home, and pets are part of our families.”
- To find out more about Petchef and their products, click here.
Feature Image Credit: Petchef
