It’s a diet known as BARF. That stands for bones and raw food - and it is having a major impact on the petfood market, according to Dylan Watkins. He’s the founder of Poppy’s Picnic, which is seeing “a meteoric rise in demand” for its raw dogfood recipes, such as chicken & bone meatballs and dried fish skins.
Having turned down a £60,000 investment offer on Dragons’ Den, the brand has since raised 10 times that amount through crowdfunding, such is the interest in ‘paleo for pooches’.
“At the moment, the raw feeding sector, though small, is actually a disruptor and, as such, is one of the most influential compared to the established and significantly bigger brand players that are now having to play catch-up,” Watkins adds. “Our aim from the start has been to make it easier for more people to feed fresh. Any fresh food in a dog’s diet is better than none.”
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BARF and RMBD (raw-meat based diet) are “all about reconnecting our pets with a time when pets lived off the land” says Mark Lewis, founder of Cotswold RAW, another raw dogfood brand. Its “nutritionally superior” products, including meals made with mince, bone, veg and tripe, are “designed to replicate a dog’s natural diet”.
Pro-raw pet owners believe such diets promote good health and can help ease or even prevent skin problems and allergies.
However, not everyone is convinced. Naysayers claim there is no evidence of health benefits. Raw meat can damage an animal’s teeth and digestion, they say, and even cause nutritional imbalance that prevents bones and immune function from properly developing.
And in January, scientists at Utrecht University in the Netherlands warned that raw meat, even when it is in commercially prepared meals, may contain bacteria and parasites, because it hasn’t been subjected to the intense heat used to make processed food safe. This could be dangerous for both pets and humans, they warned.
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