How Happy Dog Food Is Made
How Happy Dog dry food is made
From a farm near Augsburg to a sealed bag: the six steps every kibble goes through in Wehringen, and why the cooking step is the one that matters.
Dry dog food is a simple thing done carefully. Meat, offal, a carbohydrate source such as potato or rice, herbs and vegetables, ground, cooked, dried, coated in oil and packed. The quality is decided by three things: what goes in, how gently it is cooked, and how hard it is checked before it leaves. Here is each step.
1. The farm
Raw materials come from selected partner farms. Where availability allows, the cereals, potatoes and herbs come from farms around Augsburg, close enough that the tractor is often the delivery vehicle.
2. Delivery
Short routes mean fresher raw materials, fewer lorry miles and farmers who are neighbours rather than suppliers. The company is working towards 70% of raw materials from within 700 km by 2030.
3. Weighing, mixing, milling
Each recipe's ingredients are weighed to specification, mixed, milled fine and mixed again. Fine milling matters: it is what makes the starch in the potato or rice digestible once cooked.
4. Thermostufenmix: cooking in stages
The mix is pre-heated with steam, then cooked in an extruder with water and steam and formed into kibble. The kibble reaches a core temperature of at least 90°C, enough to make the starch digestible and the food safe, without the prolonged high heat that destroys vitamins and denatures protein. Cooking in stages rather than in one blast is the point of the name, and it is why the food is so easy on the gut.
5. Drying and coating
The kibble is dried, then coated with oils and natural antioxidants to the recipe, and cooled to room temperature. The coating is where the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids for skin and coat go on.
6. Checking and packing
Every kibble passes a sieve, metal detectors and magnets before it is bagged, palletised and wrapped. A retention sample is taken from every packaging run and kept in the laboratory. Only after the laboratory checks are complete does a batch leave the site. What the checks are, in detail.
Why it matters to your dog
You can see the result in the bowl and behind the dog. Gently cooked, finely milled food is absorbed rather than passed through, so the stool is smaller and firmer, the coat is glossier because the fatty acids survive, and the dog is full on a smaller portion. If you have ever wondered why the feeding guide on our bags looks low, this is why.
Wet food is different. Our Pure wet recipes are single meat cooked in the tin, up to 80% water, with no cereals, no soya and no added sugar. A dog on wet food drinks less from the bowl and produces a small stool relative to the amount fed, which surprises people switching from dry.
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