Old Dog, New Truck

BY DAWN FORD AS TOLD TO JILL NOVOTNY

I’m from the Seattle area and my husband, Ben, is from Durango, Colorado. We met working at Pyramid Brewery in Seattle. When we got married in 2008, we had a dog-walking service that we ran while we were finishing college. We were buying a lot of treats to give to our dog-walking clients, and it seemed like often these treats were being recalled for poisoning and even killing dogs. These treats were advertised as “natural” and “organic,” but it turned out they were not and were coming from China with no regulations.

We felt sick that we could be poisoning our dogs when we wanted to reward them, so a lightbulb went off. How hard could it be to make good treats for our good dogs?

We had all the taste-testers we could want with our dogs and our dog clients, and so the Barkery was born.

At first, many of our recipes didn’t make the mark, but we slowly built a great dog menu and hit the farmers market, where we would sell out most weekends. From then on, we were on the hunt for a treat truck and the Barkery hasn’t stopped since. All of our treats are made from fresh, simple ingredients, and all but one recipe is grain free. Instead, we use garbanzo flour. The menu includes savory favorites like the turkey nuggets, chicken feet, and duck necks, as well as special treats like ice cream sundaes and custom hound-dog cakes.

Slowly, we phased out the dogwalking service, and now, five years later, we both work more than 60 hours per week at the Barkery and have a staff of six. We currently have three locations with a fourth on the way this winter in downtown Seattle. We also have a distributor, Independent Pet Supply, that distributes our treats to local pet stores in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

The truck goes to Fremont Sunday Market weekly, dog parks, and to the offices of Trupanion, a pet insurance company based here in Seattle. We also do a lot of events on the Amazon campus downtown, which is dog friendly.

For an old truck, it gets around! We also do a “Yappy Hour” a few times a week, where a business or apartment complex pays us to come out and spoil the resident doggos. We love these, because it builds a common ground community because everyone loves to talk dogs.

We currently have three rescue dogs, Hazel, Bert, and Adie. Hazel and Adie are both senior girls from Old Dog Haven, a senior dog rescue here in Washington that helps dogs that, usually for age or health reasons, would not get adopted from shelters and places them in permanent foster “retirement” homes and covers all medical expenses for the remainder of that dog’s life. It’s amazing.

Hazel and Adie both have the same bad heart condition. Hazel is a 14-year-old shepherd mix and Adie is a 10-year-old chi-weenie. We also have Bert, a 5-year-old terrier mix that is full of spunk. He keeps us busy with agility classes, obedience classes, and dog park trips. We get so much joy from our fur kids that, of course, we celebrate them with a hound-dog cake or a pupcake.