One of the strangest and most unexpected aspects of running Cottage Copy has been the rise in popularity of Didy as a mascot. People mention him in emails, he gets frequent Twitter shoutouts, and occasionally gets little packages of presents from the internet.
He got a package Saturday from the lovely Claire Staffa of Sammy’s Gourmet. So FTC disclosure and all, these were from Claire, and they were free. What is also true is that even if I’d bought this stuff, I’d probably be writing about it anyway because Claire is doing some stuff that is A) incredibly cool B) probably not possible without the internet and C) is in a hard business and sticking to some business parameters that are really admirable.
There are tons of organic dog treat bakeries that run brick and mortar stores and exist online, but Claire is doing something particularly interesting. She sources treats and other dog items that are organic, made from human grade ingredients, and all local. This means that in terms of cash flow, she’s using the internet at large to help fund her local economy. That’s a huge commitment, and probably makes her life a lot harder in terms of sourcing products that already have to meet some pretty high standards. I’m impressed.
Despite all that though, I was sort of worried about this package. I’m always looking for new treats for Didy, and so I immediately said yes when Claire asked if I wanted to try some of her new products. What I didn’t think through was the fact that I’m always searching for new treats for Didy because he won’t eat anything that doesn’t have the nutritional content of a twinkie. As someone who eats very healthy food, I find this kind of appalling and gross, and I’ve been struggling to find something that satisfies his wish for junk food and doesn’t make me feel like a horrible dog parent. I was seriously concerned that Claire would go to all of the trouble of sending the samples, and that he wouldn’t eat any of them. And then, being me, I would feel like an idiot.
Claire sent along four types of treats, all of which can be found at her website if you want more information. There was a chicken treat, a pumpkin treat, a bacon snap biscuit, and a peanut butter and carrot biscuit. What first struck me was that all of the ingredients were stuff that I would happily eat. Hell, if you relabeled them and cut them into fancy shapes, I’d eat them. This both reassured me and worried me more; my normal method of buying treats for Didy is picking whatever looks the most disgusting to me personally, so it was hard to envision our tastes matching up.
So being the child of two research scientists (No, I can’t explain it either), I decided to do this taste testing in as scientific a way as possible. I put all four on a plate, and let Didy pick the order he ate them in. Since I am a total dork, I actually did this four times to see if the order remained the same or if he was just lazy and picking the one closest to him. In my defense, I live in Indiana and was Saturday, so there are only so many ways to amuse yourself.
The reasonably scientific results? Didy loved the chicken jerky (which was more like a chicken chip), and went for it first every time. The bacon snap was a bit of a harder sell, but the bacon part finally seemed to win out over the rolled oats part, and he liked them each time a little more. Unfortunately at that point we hit the usual dividing line: vegetables were just not happening, not even in peanut butter biscuit form.
I ended up feeding the vegetable based ones to the backup ghost-tester dog, who couldn’t get enough of them. The treats were clearly great; I just happen to have the dog who requires his low fat dog food to be topped with bacon.
Related posts: