tucker with me decided you want to come have you stayed home that day though tony is the proud founder and owner of healthy pet products and tony's located in peter's township now for years you were a present player correct and not far from the border of peter's talent yeah tony how did you start in the business of pet products i was actually a pet sitter and have my own business pet sitting and i saw problems with my customers dogs and cats and knew that it could be fixed through food i had been a roth eater already and there was actually a tiny little locally on pet store that was for sale called healthy pet products and i have an extensive retail background and management background so i decided to buy the store and that was nine years ago and that's a scary proposition actually when you think about it it's shoring up against some of these major big box stores that have tons of money behind them and have a network and distributors and all these relationships that they develop i personally hate the big box stores and i'll tell the audience one of the reasons why first of all most of the people that are in that store supporting that stores as workers know nothing about the products that they sell absolutely in fact there was a there was a product that i that i had i liked and i thought i bought it from this one particular bit of bookstore and so i went in there and said you carry this and they said and i had actually an empty bag because i'm one of those people i don't really remember the names of the products and when you changed it was when you changed the color of the packaging  well i i walked in with this package and said you carry it we don't carry that well i when i needed biscuits i wanted to see what they also had there on the shelf was this exact bag that i was holding an empty bag that i was holding in my hand and so they had no idea even with you know and i am a customer long time customer even when i come from arizona and i go come to your store i would stick up things and you walk in there and you have people that you've trained that are knowledgeable on the products that you sell yeah i mean i  can't be everywhere in the same at the same time so all of our employees are completely trained and what's nice is a lot of our manufacturers offer training online and they actually fill out a quiz after the training and they get a t shirt or voucher towards food or something like that which is nice and helpful to me but we have staff trainings pretty much every month we of course take off november december disco's it so busy at that time of year for everybody but yeah we we train and it's i everyone has to know what they're talking about and then you have another location besides the one here mcmurray so yeah the first location actually is the north hills location  that which is where i started in two thousand and eight so and then i opened south hills in upper st clair in two thousand and eleven and moved it to peters township in two thousand and sixteen and you actually move into a bigger location yeah we doubled we actually tripled the square footage with the south hills location and the north pole so we're nearly five thousand square feet in south wales north pole stores about forty five hundred square feet and then you also opened up a third facility so that was another acquisition there was a locally owned grooming shop that was half grooming half ret that was about five minutes from the north pole store and she had to move for her husband that relocated she reached out to me and said here's what's happening do you wan it so i did and that was in april of two thousand and fifteen and i read named it and and rebranded it and everything so you have a grooming facility as well as or as of retail yes i do and i know one of the things that you do was farmers toys and treats you're very careful with the china thing yes would you explain that or ours so all of our foods and treats nothing nothing is not only made in china but nothing is none of the ingredients are sourced in china which is important because a company could put it together here in the us but they buy everything from china yes so in effect you're getting a chinese  yes so there's a lot of loopholes within industry that people don't realize that's why you really need to rely on somebody that this is their life and this is what i eat sleep and breathe every day so i do that all the research and the homework before i even bring a product in toys is a little difficult because there are very few toy manufacturers in the united states  so most of my toys are us there's a small percentage that are china the ones that are china those have also been vetted as far as lead levels all those heavy metal toxin levels are within acceptable levels for child for children so which a lot of people don't realize that children's toys haven't accepted level of lead in them and children just like dogs and zoo is a big i think the largest pet expo for retailers and i'm always the last maybe six seven years now i've been invited to lecture there every year i'll be there next year in fact and  people from health over the world come to that and you can find anything you want at this display or can and i usually run in to tony like scavenging all the places to see what's there and we get it we get a high as we go by but there are a lot of junk products out there and you have to be discriminative in what you're buying for your animal rights and a lot of companies i mean the pet industry is growing leaps and bounds every year so everybody is wanting in on a piece of the action so you have to be even more careful not only with the products but the company because because some of the companies are brand new and you don't like all the companies that i work with i have relationships built with the owners and the people that represent the company and that means a lot you get to know them you get to know the owners of the company why they do it i mean and that was why they do it is really important i know when i had my pet supplement company when i was formulating the manufacturing of those many years ago i got in it for the sake of my own box was i was in funny products out there and i know you're an animal lover how many dogs do you have to  and you got into this because being an animal lover and passion and the understanding of knowing what healthier foods can do not only for for humans like i myself care about what i at but how it transfers in pets as well and that connection doesn't always happen so i just want to build awareness as much as i can i think i started lecturing on food manufacturing maybe seventeen years ago think was my first lecture on food manufacturing and i would hold up this bag of dog food it was a pretty bag with corn and peas and all these nice little chunks of steak and and go through this bag and i would start off to see your dog gets more nutrition if it would eat the bag as with the food it's a gag and i was saying that is joke but it was pretty much true absolutely there there was zero nutrition in there garbage food yet and that's a problem with the industry huge problem any idea how big the industry is the food industry for pets the source dollars go just the food i think it was thirty five billion for twenty sixteen well wow wow i know right and the entire industry is sixty two billion and that grows that that goes up a few billion every year yep it sure does and it goes a show that people are seeing their pets as part of the family not something you industry again to go back to how the industry is growing and people are willing to spend more companies are getting a little trickier with the all natural freezes because they that really has no definition within the f d a so they they can say all natural but it doesn't necessarily mean anything even the word organic to be used in the label and it doesn't mean that it's u s d a organic so it's becoming more difficult not only for us within the industry but for the consumer and another thing that happens a lot is the companies are changing hand being bought out so very quickly so the smaller companies the mom and pop companies even bigger ones that you have grown and then the bigger companies buy them then they change the formula so they may have a good reputation and suddenly they're not making the same product but the packaging looks the same right and not only that they might not even change the formula but they might change where they source the ingredients because if they're sourcing from china they're going to get it cheaper than in the united states so their bottom line is going to be higher so  and bigger companies are even are even being bought out so and people don't realize that you know i'm on my radio show on twelve fifty am every saturday morning let me throw in a plug nine to ten i did a show that shows healthy pets healthy people and i did a show on dog food and we were talking about grain free which is you know extremely important to not give your dogs grain they can't process them any of the grains but in the process of making kibble there's fifty percent of sugar in their starch and sugar which they can't process either and then you sit there and you see all these dogs with diabetes and all these cats with kidney and i mean well you know why and you wonder why but it's legal  you know and they don't have to identify that it's sugar in there no no you know and i know when i did that show on the radio i got a big response a number of e mails from people how come we're not aware of this as well they don't want you to be aware of it first of all and shame on the manufacturer it does not have to be on the guaranteed analysis it doesn't have to be right and then and then the f d a doesn't look at pet food as food it's feed and so there's a whole completely different standard to what we consider as food and what we think is food and what's in our pet food absolutely correct so like i'm always thankful when i when i talk with tony and i know what he's doing with clients that are coming restore you educate people we do that's the main mission in the hopes that a lightbulb goes on usually we're fortunate i think we already have the reputation and people come in seeking answers and usually they are receptive to the things that we tell them and we definitely color outside the lines and say things that we probably so then say but we say them tell me about it i always say something that in my opinion that you know that i'm covered so yeah but you're looking out for the best interests and i almost always say to people tony you're going to pay it either in the food the quality the food or you're going to pay it at the veterinarian's all right and then your dogs in you do have different levels of food people with a man like myself quality food and i buy a particular food from tony that i really like fact i'm afraid to tell people about it because i know if i go in a store will be bought out i'll be upset but  you have you have grades but even your lower grades are better than the average grade that you get at a grocery store right and i do that because i want as many people to be able to afford better pet food that i that i can possibly cover i want to broad a range as i can so i have a forty pound bag of food for thirty to ninety nine and you can compare that to anything you can find in the grocery store you get the same price for another brand in the grocery store and this is a better food less no sellers one hundred percent usa made and sourced so there's options so if you can afford the premium food for forth i don't disagree but if you can afford the premium food for each meal you can always get a little lesser grade and always give one premium will day that helps you know so the least getting the nutrition that way something i tell people is the more whole foods they get real food they get the better off they are and what people will notice what do they notice first on their eating a better food usually vitality and energy level just which is much better you know them but even you know they have an anal gland that has to be squeezed and when that when their pups are harder it's a natural way of squeezing the i don't go in correct you know and then you see when you have all these fillers people dogs have mushy poops and  and yellow large and yet because they can't process the it's extraordinary amount of fats so it is amazing when you're giving quality food the difference in the response from your animal that's probably the most immediate as what you see in the  yeah so tell us the difference between canned food and drug food so believe it or not in my opinion i think all that canned food couldn't could be considered better than dry food and a lot of people find that shocking they think that feeding canned food is treating their paths to something special but they need more oyster in their diet they'd naturally in the wild eat muscle meat their bodies are designed for that and organs that's full of moisture very kibble is completely void of moisture and dogs really get their moisture from their food mostly yes yes and then the whole i think the whole process of making a dry food is so much worse than the process of making canned food yeah i mean the high heat process that it goes through  most mills or garbage food there are a few that that are good yeah but most mills or bad by most meals are by products so when you getting that kibble you're really feeding in my opinion garbage food yeah if you don't mind i'm going to tell the audience a great way to determine how much sugar is in there in their kibble absolutely you look at the bag and you know they can advertise anything they want on the bag but when you look at the bag if you look at when they give the analysis of the product inside there and you'll see proteins that moisture ash or any of those like the first four ingredients like that you don't worry about the minerals or the dyes that are in there and so forth you don't worry about that and you take those three or four readings that i just mentioned and you subtract from one hundred and that what's left is the amount of sugar that's in there and on the on the bag of you'll see peas lentils beings all of those things those are rice you know those are all all starches also gors and it's hard to find a kibble that's under forty percent sugar it is because they need that for the it comes out of the extruder and you sit there and want to do that for palatability yeah and then they then that's when they spray the little little minute bit of minerals and vitamins that they put on there so so it sticks to the fat you know so so it's and that's not the case at all i don't want to get into that's a whole hour lecture right by itself but in my opinion quality canned food is way better way to go than than any dry food absolutely so as we talk about dry foods and i look to tony is an expert on this because she's had all these years of passion and experience what's the difference between a freeze dried food and what we've just talked about so freeze dried food is much closer to the real food category because they're taking reeling greedy ends and freeze drying them so they don't even use heat they they flash freeze it so your nutrients are much more viable in that suit and i think and i tell a lot of customers this when they walk into the store looking for new foods that they have choices category choices now and i run through the categories and i usually say we have raw is a choice freeze dried dehydrated canned and terrible and that is the order it goes in quality as well and that i get this look like so so raw food as far as i'm concerned is the best if i wanted to go to raw food and i'm feeding my dog kibble to do i have to over a period of time integrate that raw food into with  do but i only tell people to transition slowly because i'm being conservative when i say switched my dog terrafugia eighteen years ago i literally cold turkey at her one day she was eating purina when i found out about our office sorry the next day i know me the next day she was eating raw food and she had no diarrhea no digestive upset whatsoever and we never turn back so if i think you're absolutely right but i would add this caviar if you have an older dog i would transition slowly up and it slowly if it's if it's an old compromise medical compromise dog oh i would transfer the transition at over a month that's what i would do a younger dog you can make that transition for you i mean my dogs which for me making food to actually buy them from  store manufactured freeze dried draw from and good food and i i made the changes and in two days you know and that's typically the case and that was it so all i did was i had half a mixture and by the second day we were we were full you know full blown right raw food a puppy i would probably do a transition because they have an image for you no intestinal tract so i would chances in over a week or so i agree but that's why one of those myths like the tooth what food in the dry food with the teeth it's one of these and it keeps getting told in the veterinary office it gets i'm told and by people in the know that should know they digest the raw foods so much more easily than the  le the oyster content the enzymes and the natural enzymes in the food viability of nutrients their bodies just know what to do with it whereas kebble they work so hard to try to extract nutrients from  that so it's usually a no help brainer as far as switching to ross yeah so so you mention freeze dried and you mentioned the hydrated what's the difference between those two so the freeze dried uses that class freezing process and then the dehydrated uses a low heat over a long period of time i think the average heat they use is like one hundred fifty degrees so when you have a d hydrated food in order for your animal to eat that you have to put water back into the full you do and you don't have to do that with the freeze dried you can do either or or is always a good thing so i usually recommend hydrating it yes so this is if we can see this this is an example of a treat that i buy from tony's store healthy pet products and it's a freeze dried beef and they have chicken and so for the different formulas and it's mostly beef has a little bit of  vegetables and there is well my dogs go nuts for it as tony as you can see that tucker took it like immediately will come up but when they when i open up that wrapper and they're in another room and i  walk into the room their heads are up and they're waiting for their treat you know all right take the lid off the cookie jar they love those things yeah and they're healthy for them they are so people and i've had these conversations with with people that i you know conference with or consult with probably a better word they'll say well you have to worry about bacteria when you feed raw or when you feed freeze dried and it will say that on the packaging well that's a that's a precaution and it's a protective measure for the manufacturer basically what that is absolute and i begin to tell them that the chances of having an infection bacterial infection occurs the studies like numerous studies a dry kibble dross and dog food is more contaminated that annie brought food you're going to use as far as potential danger to you yes and can grow other bacteria as as it sits on the shelf big mouths like myself sometimes get a little trouble i get a sense of i don't like what we're saying now and you know that holds true for medicine and yes you know you go to vets office and what are they sell the worst food you ever see  the word prescription and food even be in the same sentence and it's i was i was helping somebody who had a dog was diagnosed with diabetes in in tennessee and i said what are you feeding she's on that diet from the vet's office i said would you please go get that dog food in reading greens to me so here's a dog with diabetes first ingredient meat byproduct and that's only by weight second ingredient there's the nutrition you know and they were like in shock as we were working over the months that dog became a diabetic after being put on that on that food by the veterinarian now the veterinarians treating the dog for diabetes with injections and you know it's crazy when it when it's all nutritional and it's wrong from time to time it pet products you have you have people come in to speak we do we do we try to do that as much as we can so and you know my goal is just to reach as many as many people humans as i possibly can to change the lives of dogs and cats which we should say everything we pretty much said today can go for both or both in more so for cat yeah because they're obligate carnivores tony we're at we're at the end of our show where there was a vast panel show lot information i thanked i thank tony lasky for a healthy pet products for coming in and spreading knowledge and i thank healthy pet and when you're healthy you're happy also