COURTESY OF © THE CRUMP GROUP

Canine cuisine

Canadian-made Dog Delights are a paws-itive hit with dogs (and owners too)

by KIRA VERMOND

Back in 2014, Joe and Margot Crump, Costco members and founders of The Crump Group Inc., in Mississauga, Ontario, took a call at work that would change everything. Costco had recently tested their product, Canadian-made dog treats, and they were a hit. Now Costco wanted more. A lot more: 240 pallets—or 10 truckloads—of chewy sweet potato chews before October.

“You see those commercials where the orders start coming in really fast and people are blowing into brown paper bags because they’re hyperventilating? It was kind of like that,” Joe jokes now. “We’d never heard of an order like that before. So we just put ourselves on high speed and never turned back.”

While they attribute a lot of today’s success to Costco’s belief in their products, which range from lamb sticks, to beef sticks and jerky, to chicken sticks and even an Advent calendar for the holidays, much of it comes down to their own, er, dogged determination.

Founded in 2006 as a start-up run out of their garage and family room with their four children, The Crump Group now operates from a 130,000-square-foot facility and employs more than 400 people. The company is committed to food safety and quality, using only a handful of simple, natural ingredients primarily sourced from Canadian farms, with lamb originating from New Zealand and sweet potatoes from the U.S.

With all of its success, the company now looks for ways to give back to the community, whether it’s donating at least two truckloads of sweet potatoes a year to Feed Ontario or offering products to fundraisers for rescue dogs. The company is also moving toward recyclable packaging and using sustainable ingredients such as miscanthus grass and micro-algae oil to replace salmon oil.

Margot says she’s not surprised their Dog Delights premium products have done as well as they have at Costco. “We’re very focused on quality,” she explains. “It’s just not putting a bunch of stuff in the treats that the dogs don’t need. It’s about finding the best way to help pet parents feed their pets and giving them good options.”

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