GoodNoze was formed in 2014 and was founded on the belief that companion animal nutrition had lost its way. Animal nutritionist and ‘top dog’ at the company, Frank Bellerby, was horrified looking at some of the ingredients that go into commercial pet food - equating it to feeding up your pets on McDonald’s. Frank knew a thing or two about what animals need to eat and set about seeing if he could create a product – Good Noze - that combined freshness, rawness, and convenience all together.
(Listen to the full interview below:)
Pets are often beloved members of the family and in recent years a reliance on highly refined diets has seen an increasing prevalence of pet health problems, like allergies and cancer, appearing in cats and dogs.
“The majority of the commercial food that you buy is cooked. There really isn't healthy cooked food for animals. The cooking itself destroys or changes all the components in it. Vitamins, enzymes and amino acids are often completely destroyed by the cooking process,” says Sue Bellerby.
“Other proteins and ingredients are changed to the point where they're useless or even harmful. The chemicals that are in these foods, preservatives and thousands of chemicals, if you just look at the back of the packaging of these processed dog foods - a lot of those chemicals long term are cancer causing for animals,” says Sue.
In the long-term, feeding your pets with these kinds of foods can lead to upset stomachs, allergies, autoimmune diseases and cancer. Through their research the Good Noze team found that raw feeding was the healthiest, but they couldn’t just feed prime cuts of raw meat though because that wouldn’t be a complete diet for the pets either.
“The feed needs more than just meat but feeding raw as part of the balanced diet for your animal is really important.”
Good Noze is one of the only pet products in the country that focuses on high-quality raw ingredients. Using a freeze-drying process ensures that all the nutrients remain in the feed, while taking out the moisture to help preserve the product.
“So our ingredients - they’re just raw, we don’t put anything nasty in it. We’ve just got the raw proper meat. It also has the animal’s raw bone in it, which is so important for the animal’s health,” says Sue on how Good Noze is produced.
“That is all minced and chopped up and minced into the meat, plus the offal from the animal as well. We add some minerals and vitamins that an animal would need. There's nothing else added to it at all and we use a lot of wild animals where we can.”
Sue says that sourcing wild animals to use in their products can be time-consuming and expensive but they are committed to finding good quality meat products. Good Noze uses wild rabbits for one of their product lines and the rabbits are sourced from the Mackenzie Country where ex-SAS officers shoot them. Only the rabbits that have been killed with head shots can be used to prevent bullets ending up in the food.
If you are concerned about what’s in your petfood, Sue says you can easily check the quality by:
1. Examining the ingredient list. Check for inclusion of “real” meat and not meat by products.
2. Checking levels of cooking used. Both kibble and air-dried foods heat products to over 75 degrees which denatures critical health factors (as mentioned previously)
Focusing on a quality product, Good Noze have been steadily increasing their stockists in both the North and South islands since they launched in 2014 and have also expanded to five different countries overseas.
Sue says that overseas, freeze-dried products are popular because the market is more aware of the benefits of the process and is excited to see the freeze-drying technology grow over the coming years-especially for human food as well.
If you’re interested in trying out Good Noze for your cat or dog, visit their website for more information https://goodnoze.co.nz/. You can also purchase the range at the local supermarkets, SWOP, SuperValue and TeUku FourSquare.