When you buy online or enter a dog treats store, what do you do first? Do you go straight to your preferred brand, or do you check out all of the new package out there? What is the lure of it all?
If you are a healthy dog treat fanatic, you will be drawn to the packaging that maybe has a lot of wolf-like dogs on the covers. You will look for the 100% single ingredient dog treats with words like organic, or fresh, or evolutions way.
But this is only half way through the story. Once you buy the treat, it might remain in your back room or pantry for months. And if you are like most dog owners, your pantry room will be in the laundry and it won’t be temperature controlled. Many owners let sunlight on the package and even leave the package top open for days at a time.
But that is the end point, just before you feed your dog the delicious treat. That moment, will be as stale as that treat is going to ever get.
So, lets rewind to the beginning, the start of this process and how long a dog treat journeys before it hits the shelves, or is delivered by courier to you.
The wholesale dog treat journey.
Once the abattoir has done their thing the meat is shipped off to drier (which is sometimes the wholesaler, sometimes not), they cut and dry the meat into the bite sized treats suitable for their given bag size.
Wholesalers, if they don’t dry the product themselves, will then buy the treat of the drier and store the product in a big warehouse, sometimes for months at a time. Getting a scale of economy to make a profit, sometimes shortens the storage time of newly dried treats at the retailer.
Then a retailer buys the treats off the wholesaler, and markets/ sells the treats, in their own packaging (usually) either directly to the consumer, or through a big pet store.
Wholesale dog treats – where is the best place for a retailer to buy treats?
From the above, you can see there are a few middle people in the dog treat journey, but each serves a specific purpose. Not many wholesalers have great marketing skills, or can be bothered with breaking treats down into very small packets, the size that most dog owners want to buy.
Some retailers even use a ‘drop shipping’ place, which is essentially a large warehouse (temperature controlled or most likely NOT) that aggregates all of the treats the retailer wants to sell, and from many different wholesalers.
This kind of drop-ship retailer never actually sees or touches the treats, they trust the drop shipper to take care of all of the order fulfilment, they themselves just do the marketing and collect the initial money from the sale.
Given this information, you can see it’s a very dynamic market place. At Healthy Dog Treats Retailer (Australia) we personally prefer buying from wholesalers who also dry the treats, on premises, because that typically ensures better quality control. You and them are not relying on small farms to do accurate or healthy practices on each batch to ensure consistent quality. AND when done properly this can also reduce the price that a wholesaler will sell at.
But the thing is, particularly if a wholesaler is drying product themselves and storing it, they want to mainly sell in pallet sizes to retailers. That then puts a lot of cost back onto the retailer to have appropriate store space. Vermin free, and temperature controlled. Which again, not all retailers have either!
But if they buy a pallet of each of the treat types, they would need a massive warehouse and employee workforce, and unless they get scale that will dramatically add to risk and cost for the retailer to keep cashflow going.
For many countries, we see the best model (for retailer and end customer) to be where the primary wholesaler dries their own product, and the retailer is able to buy smaller than full pallets off the primary wholesaler and act as a secondary wholesaler and retailer.
While this might seem like double handling and adding cost to the end product, it usually increases the quality and longevity of the treats in the retail pack considerably.
It also means that smaller businesses like cafes, dog training clubs etc, are able to buy much smaller batches of treats, at close to primary wholesaler prices – something that they couldn’t do, if they bought directly from the primary wholesaler who prefers customers have very large minimum order quantities.
WILD ANIMAL wholesale processing
Be aware, that the above applies mostly to stock standard farmed animals in the dog treat chain. The fishing industry is a whole other story, and one of their aims is to have a chain and process where the product doesn’t fall apart before reaching the consumer or the store.
In the case of kangaroo dog treats, this and many other wild animal treats used in wholesale often have a very different journey. This is because the animals are often caught in the wild, and don’t go directly (live) to an abattoir. For roos (one of the healthiest cleanest protein sources your dogs could possibly eat), they are caught in the wild, and stored for up to a week, in refrigerated hanging sheds in the field.
They may even be gutted and fully ‘dressed’ well before being send to a wholesaler for oven drying, or frozen and stored at the licenced catcher’s premises and released to the wholesaler on demand. The process is very different, but all aimed at providing the best quality product, at the lowest price, to the wholesale dog treat companies’ premises, when required.
CONCLUSIONS
The act of wholesaling dog treats can get very complex very quickly.
Besides the logistics of storage and couriering between primary and secondary wholesaler and eventually onto the end customer, there are a lot of quality control and pricing considerations to have.
If you like flexibility, wide choice, and quality of treat …. The middle-sized dog treat wholesaler is often your best choice.
