Aussie businesses have ramped up their delivery services over the past few weeks, often sidestepping the middleman to deliver direct to people’s doors.
There’s now a plethora of local-delivery options for food, booze and even jigsaw puzzles. Melbourne-born company Scratch has always had a direct-to-consumer delivery service – but its products are consumed by dogs.
Scratch makes dry, preservative-free pet food in Sydney using 98 per cent Australian whole ingredients, such as sustainably sourced kangaroo meat. Its subscription service delivers 7.5-kilogram boxes of kibble as often as your dog needs it, based on breed, age, weight and body shape.
“We keep things pretty simple,” says Mike Halligan, who co-founded the company in 2018 with Doug Spiegelhauer, who used to work for a mass-market dog-food manufacturer. “It’s all about great Aussie ingredients and using as much of them as possible.”
Halligan grew up with four dogs raised on supermarket-bought “gooey stuff” out of a can. He rarely thought about how what they ate affected their health.
Over time he started buying fancier, pricier dog food, but found many big brands weren’t open about their supply chains or the ingredients they used, and made vague claims about how the food would benefit dogs.
“Dogs needed better food and by cutting out stores and putting those margins into proper ingredients, I could do it properly,” he says.
Scratch makes two types of high-protein dry food using locally and ethically sourced ingredients: kangaroo ($79 a box) and a turkey, lamb and beef mix ($69 a box). The recipes – developed with input from an animal nutritionist – are listed online in their entirety, Both contain ingredients such as pumpkin, carrot, chickpeas and turmeric, and healthy oils (derived from salmon, flaxseed and sunflower) that vets say are beneficial for skin and coat health.
Surfer Mick Fanning is an investor – he bought in after seeing improvements in his dog Harper’s chronic skin condition.
Pet owners sign up for the delivery service through the company’s website, plugging in info about their pooch – age, breed, activity level – as they go.
“We use that to work out how [long] each box will last, and knowing when you need food, we’re able to use that data to make fresher food for [your dog],” says Halligan.
Scratch also calls each of its customers to check in and make sure the dogs are enjoying the food. Delivery is free to addresses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. (Scratch doesn’t deliver to Western Australia or the Northern Territory.)
The packing is 100 per cent recyclable, and one per cent of revenue is donated to environmental and social causes.
If you sign up now, you (well, your dog) will also get a free bag of Scratch’s all-natural beef jerky – just enter the code APRILTREAT at checkout.
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