Pet Project: Industry Partner and the Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts Take a Healthy Bite out of a Growing Industry

by Lisa E. Boyes

In a country in which pet food is a billion-dollar industry and more than 12.5 million pets (mostly dogs and cats) cohabit with humans, what Canadians feed their best friends is far from a trivial question, especially as pet allergies and food intolerance appear to be on the rise.

Concern for her own pet’s allergies was the catalyst for Laura Boston to change her career and open her own business, Animal Sense Pet Products Inc. It wasn’t long before she had dogs salivating for her certified-organic dog-training treats, appropriately named Gobbles.™

Yet Boston had trouble keeping pace with the growing demand for her dog biscuits, for two reasons. Those reasons caused her to contact Winnie Chiu, food scientist with George Brown College’s Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts.

One of Boston’s products, a chicken-liver biscuit, broke too readily, making manufacturing, packaging and transportation of the product difficult and costly. The other, a chicken-cranberry-based biscuit, came out fine in small quantities. But the recipe failed when Boston attempted to reproduce the biscuit in much larger quantities. Again, production costs and the unpredictability of those costs were major concerns for Boston.

In response to the first problem, Chiu analyzed the ingredients of the chicken-liver biscuit to assess a common concern in organic products: lack of sufficient binding among the ingredients when gluten isn’t present. Gluten, a known dog allergen, is a protein found in wheat and other grains. Gaining inspiration from pastry chefs at the college’s Chef’s School (the dog treats are baked), Chiu experimented at the culinary centre with varying proportions of the product’s ingredients before hitting on the solution to the brittle biscuit. Adding organic chicken to the chicken-liver recipe reliably melded the product’s ingredients, resulting in a new recipe while adhering to Boston’s goal: to use minimal ingredients that mimicked a dog’s natural (wild) diet.

Solving the chicken-cranberry dog treat problem was also fundamental to the continued success of Boston’s business: how to scale up the product to manufacture it in quantity, while retaining taste and quality. Chiu worked with Boston to multiply the product’s ingredients based on measures of weight, rather than volume. Volume measurement tends to be less consistent in production, and inconsistent measures in something like a small dog treat can significantly derail a recipe.

In both instances, Chiu involved a culinary arts graduate student from the college in overcoming the Gobbles™ production problems. Boston also readily trained the George Brown student in production onsite at her start-up manufacturing plant in the Toronto Food Business Incubator (TFBI) facility. Chiu has also extended the benefits of applied research projects like this one to the curriculum in George Brown’s new Nutritional Cuisine program. She has developed the program’s new Introduction to Food Science course and will guest lecture on product development and applied food science.

As for Boston, she is now better positioned to bring Animal Sense pet-food products to a larger market, and ultimately to expand the business into organic grooming products and apparel for pets. In future, George Brown College fashion design and graphic design students may also help her to do just that.

For as long as humans have recorded their history, circa 1500 B.C., dogs have figured prominently in people’s lives, as hunters, shepherds, watchdogs and warriors. Improving dog-food quality is one viable way to support the human-dog bond and to expand the Canadian quality pet-food industry.

George Brown College’s Office of Applied Research and Innovation seed-funded this project at the Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts, with support from the Ontario Centres of Excellence and in-kind support from industry partner Animal Sense Pet Products Inc.