EP 536. Powered by Inukshuk–And Here’s Why

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the capital of New Brunswick, which is one of those little out-of-the-way places. Nobody ever hears about New Brunswick, but you all have been hearing me talk about it the past couple of weeks because it’s awesome. And I am at the headquarters of Inukshuk Performance Dog Food, meeting with President Emily Corey. Emily, how the heck are you?

Emily Corey: I’m doing well. How are you?

Ramsey Russell: I’m doing fine. Thank you very much for having me. I’m impressed. This place is impressive. On the one hand, it’s kind of big, but on the other hand, it’s not. It’s not like some major corporation. I want to say boutique for some reason, but it’s just this nice little headquarters. A lot going on here.

Emily Corey: Yeah, we’re busy. But no, we are just one establishment, about 80 employees, 100,000 square feet.

Ramsey Russell: 100,000 square feet. Yeah, not tiny.

Emily Corey: Not tiny, but not massive either.

Ramsey Russell: How long has Inukshuk existed?

Emily Corey: Inukshuk as a brand, has been around since about the year 2000. We launched it.

Ramsey Russell: 2000. You grew up here in Fredericton?

Emily Corey: I did, yes.

Ramsey Russell: What was growing up as a young lady in New Brunswick like?

Emily Corey: You know what, as a New Brunswicker, we love it here. It’s this tiny little hidden gem.

Ramsey Russell: I can see why. It is a hidden gem.

Emily Corey: On the east coast of Canada. You know, the population of the province is less than a million. It’s about 850,000, I think, now and it’s a lot of nature. You know, we’ve got three hubs, three or four hubs that are between 100,000 and 200,000 people, basically, and the rest of it’s woods. So if you’re an outdoorsy person and you like rivers and coastline, you spend a lot of time just escaping the city, if you can call it that.

Ramsey Russell: Did you grow up outdoorsy?

Emily Corey: Yeah, very much so.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the ways that a young Emily entertained herself in rural New Brunswick growing up?

Emily Corey: A lot of tree forts. I also grew up with three brothers, so we spent a lot of time building things on bikes in the woods, flipping over rocks, seeing what we could discover. Frogs, lots of catching frogs and lizards. My mother could tell you a lot of stories about animals that made their way into our house without her knowledge.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of your fondest memories growing up?

Emily Corey: Oh, gosh. I remember just, so where we grew up, it backed up onto a woodlot that’s owned by one of the universities here. So it’s very untouched. They use it for research. But the series of trails back there were just incredible. So we would take bikes and just disappear. And I don’t know what we would even do all day long, but we would be out there looking at stuff, looking at trees.

Ramsey Russell: Just immersing yourself in nature.

Emily Corey: Yeah. Lots of campfires, lots of time spent on rivers, swimming, stuff like that. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: New Brunswick is a maritime province, which implies a lot of saltwater, ocean-type stuff. And I know that commercial fishing, we’ll talk about that in a little bit, is a big deal here. But so far, I haven’t seen it. I just keep expecting to round a big old hill. I feel like I’m in West Virginia or something. I expect to come up over a hill and see the ocean. Where the heck is the ocean from here?

Emily Corey: As you describe it, about an hour away, done in time, not in miles or kilometers. No, we’re a little bit inland where we are here on the St. John River. But really, it’s about two hours driving if you’re going farther east or about an hour south.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of life in New Brunswick revolves around that St. John River.

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It really does. I’ve heard directions referenced to it, distances referenced to it, everything. It’s almost like the femoral artery of the province in terms of culturally speaking.

Emily Corey: It’s one of the biggest rivers in the country, I believe.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Emily Corey: It starts way up in Quebec, yeah, and comes all the way down through. But it’s a big wide river. It’s, you know, almost 100 meters and what is, you’ll have to convert that for me. But anyway, it’s a big wide river for most of the length. And it, fishing, hunting has always been a huge part of the culture around here, and it revolves around really that river and its headwaters.

Ramsey Russell: “I’m going to make a dog food or a pet food out of corn, and then I’m going to supplement it with some of these other little things. It doesn’t make sense. And I see it expressed in the pile out in the backyard. It just runs right through them.”

Ramsey Russell: What are the origins of Inukshuk Professional Dog Food as a company? How did you all start?

Emily Corey: So the company’s been around a little bit longer than that. Inukshuk Professional Dog Foods is owned by Cory Nutrition, and Cory Nutrition was founded in 1982.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, wow.

Emily Corey: Yeah, a little while ago, by my father, but under different circumstances. When the company started, we were a manufacturer of high-energy salmon foods. Aquaculture salmon farms, Atlantic salmon farms, were a big growing industry, an emerging industry, let’s say, at that time. So when this company was founded as a salmon food production company, it was when there was a lot of independent farmers, about 62 at that time. And it grew along with the industry of salmon farming, which is most of the salmon you would find in your grocery stores today.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody was telling me. I’ve heard about this a lot is that historically the St. John River and other places were like major wild Atlantic salmon fishing destinations, like way back when. This is where people came to fishing and stuff like that. And then some dams got put in for hydroelectric, and the wild fishing dissipated. Did the salmon industry spawn pursuant to that? Do you know? I don’t know.

Emily Corey: They’re kind of two different things. Like, we still have a couple of strong salmon rivers in the province, one being the Miramichi that some of your listeners may know of. The Restigouche still has a decent population, and a little bit farther north it’s also a beautiful river system, all crystal-clear water with big large salmon in it. The St. John, to your point, had a couple of dams put in, and that really affected the runs here. The industry, it’s farming. The decline in population, like, the dam went in in the 1970s, the biggest dam on the St. John River here, and farming started in the 1980s. And there might be a loose correlation there, but it was more along the lines of, like, how do you commercialize this resource? How do we get more food into people’s bellies? And farming is obviously a different way of doing that, a better, more effective way of doing that, if you’re doing it for food. But there’s still the allure of the salmon rivers all throughout this province. And as you go farther north too, into Newfoundland and into Gaspésie in Quebec.

Ramsey Russell: As you and everybody else in New Brunswick I’ve talked to have referenced and alluded to, New Brunswick is blessed with an abundance of natural resources, fish and lumber and wildlife and everything else. How did your dad end up getting into his line of work doing the commercial fish food? I mean, was he born into a commercial fisherman family, or what?

Emily Corey: No, he grew up on a dairy farm. So it was him and his brother. His father had cows. His brother was the first of the Corys to graduate from high school. My father went off to university after that and got a degree here at the local university in biology, but then went out to the west coast in British Columbia to get a master’s in microbiology and came across something he’d never seen before, which was an early-days fish farm out on the west coast. And he got popped in, got talking to the guy, and was like, “This is what I want to do.” He’s always been an entrepreneurial guy, but his background is farming. So anyway, he came back to the east coast. The farms were starting to emerge around that time, and he got into it originally as a distribution company for supplies for aquaculture on the east coast. And from there, did that for a few years. And then his feed manufacturer burnt to the ground. So there was a need now for salmon feed on the east coast of Canada. And being the entrepreneur that he is, he decided that that was what he was going to do.

Ramsey Russell: All entrepreneurs have an aha moment.

Emily Corey: Oh, it’s wild.

Ramsey Russell: His took place on the west coast.

Emily Corey: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: And he said, “Wow, there’s a need for that back home.”

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And you know, I don’t know, it kind of. I think an entrepreneur has to work very hard. Work harder than, it’s not a 9-to-5 job. And it doesn’t surprise me at all that he grew up on a dairy farm. That is one of the most physically and mentally 24/7 demanding careers somebody could have.

Emily Corey: Hard work, It’s all hard work.

Ramsey Russell: Were your grandparents also in the dairy industry?

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Just grew up in that. So how did you come into the dog food company? Or how did you come into Cory Nutrition? I should say.

Emily Corey: So I have three siblings, I’ve got three brothers, and I’m number two in the stack. And, you know, we grew up doing all odd jobs around here. I packed dog food bags, I’ve answered phones, and I’ve stickered things for days on end. Basically, whatever needed to be done, we helped out with as kids, and that was our summer job for a number of years. But I took a hiatus and spent a few years at university and went on and did a PhD in animal physiology and eventually found my way back. Love academia, love research, but it’s not my full-time gig.

Ramsey Russell: Understood.

Emily Corey: Yeah, it’s a different lifestyle, and I’m better suited for this, the business aspect of it. But now, it’s always been part of what we did. Be it fish, be it dogs. We always had dogs and animals and stuff in the house, and, you know, it just came full circle.

Ramsey Russell: When you were growing up, did you accompany your dad to work?

Emily Corey: Yeah, sometimes.

Ramsey Russell: What was that like?

Emily Corey: It depended on the day, you know, some days. But it was always cool. We were in there. We were really little. I remember drawing on their whiteboards and drawing the fish for them, and we’d draw little dogs. We were taking a little bit of pet food at the time and, you know, looking at all these people, some of whom are still here, that were adults at the time, just kind of wondering what they did all day. But it was definitely, you know, you don’t have a grasp of what actually happens here, what running a business is like, just none. It’s an amazing thing coming in as an adult and kind of looking at what this place is and the fact that he was able to grow this from nothing.

Ramsey Russell: From nothing.

Emily Corey: Nothing.

Ramsey Russell: What was his aha moment, going from fish food into performance dog food?

Emily Corey: This is one of those things, right, like you like to think that people have these moments in their self-created, but they’re not. A lot of it’s circumstance. What happened for us? So we had dabbled in pet food. Fish food’s great, but it’s seasonal, so we’d have six months very busy and six months that were really slow.

Ramsey Russell: Never thought about that.

Emily Corey: Northern part of the world, they’re ectotherms, so they only really eat for about six months of the year.

Ramsey Russell: So you all don’t get cold up here, do you in the wintertime. Emily Corey: It gets pretty cold sometimes. Pretty cold sometimes. You’re making fish food. We had dabbled a little bit. We had done some private label contracts and stuff in the 1990s. And right around 2000, we had this guy come in here. And New Brunswick’s not a big place, right. He was from Dalhousie, New Brunswick, which is very inland. And he was buying a metric ton of salmon, high-energy salmon food at a time. And he’d come in and he did this a few times. And my father, founder Lee, happened to be here one day when this guy walks in, and he goes, “What are you doing with this stuff?” And, you know, because the natural assumption right here is that you’re baiting bears or something, like you’re using this in the woods.

Ramsey Russell: I wouldn’t even have thought about that.

Emily Corey: Yeah. For something that’s, you know, like there’s cheaper ways to do that, I guess being the point. And this guy looks at him, he’s like, “Oh no, no. I’m feeding these to my dogs.” You’re feeding this to your dogs? He’s like, “Yeah, I’m a dog musher. I’ve got a dog sled team, and I can’t find a food that actually keeps weight on these things and keeps them going in the wintertime when we’re running.” And my dad just kind of looked at him, was like, “Man, we can make something so much better than fish food. At least species-appropriate.” So that kind of sparked the whole idea of inukshuk, a different name. At the time, it was Mushers Choice. But from there, he took it over to our roots being in fish, to a canine nutritionist, and worked with a man by the name of Dr. Dale Hill, who specializes in working dogs, to develop these three initial formulas specifically for mushers.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. Is sled dogging a big deal up here?

Emily Corey: It’s bigger than you think it might be. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, for some reason I’m thinking you gotta be like an Eskimo. That’s coming from the deep South right now. So I don’t know, you know, but I mean, have you ever been on a dog sled? Do you see them running down the roads or something?

Emily Corey: You don’t see them running down the roads. I have been on one up in the Yukon a number of years ago, but you know, we’re rural here, but these guys are in the woods, right. Some of these guys have 200 dogs in the woods.

Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding. Here in New Brunswick?

Emily Corey: There’s a couple around New Brunswick. There’s some into Maine, into Michigan, there’s some coming.

Ramsey Russell: Are they competitive, or are they just doing it to work or hunt, or what are they doing?

Emily Corey: Some of them compete. So there’s the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest would be the big races, but there’s races for competition. But there’s also a lot of tourism that evolves around that kind of thing as well. Right. Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.

Emily Corey: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I just, I don’t know, when I drive around here, I just don’t look around like thinking this is sled dog country.

Emily Corey: Yeah, I know.

Ramsey Russell: But, It started that way.

Emily Corey: It started that way.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. So, where do you go from there? You come up with these formulas, and you know, my gateway into Inukshuk Professional Dog Food was my dog trainer, Alan Sandiford, Char’s dog trainer. I can remember going to pick her up one day, and he was shopping for dog foods. He was very disappointed with the available options, the big-box brands in the States. He was doing a lot of research and started noticing that many companies were having big recalls and all that kind of stuff. He started showing me a nutritional breakdown, and it didn’t mean much to me or register much to me. But, by God, when Char showed up at his place, that’s what she was eating. The first thing I noticed, No more ear infections. She was constantly battling ear infections, and no more ear infections. And he went to it. So, I converted to it, and it’s like rocket fuel for a little dog like that. It really, truly is like rocket fuel. I got to talk to him about it one day and asked, “What results are you seeing?” And it’s not coming off some scientific magazine or the back of a box or a sales pitch. It’s just what he’s seeing as a guy that runs a lot of high-performance animals. It was just a litany of all pluses. From those three original formulas that you all developed for converting into pet nutrition, have you all tweaked it any, or is that pretty much the standard?

Emily Corey: It’s pretty much been the exact same. There may have been some early changes, but no, we solidified our formulas. The way they were designed, so there’s three levels. You’ve got your 32/32, 32% protein, 32% fat. That is the one that’s going to keep your sled dog, your endurance athlete, running all day, every day. That’s what it’s designed to do. One step down from that is your 30% protein, 25% fat. That’s a good, versatile dog food for your more mixed athletes. That’s where most of our hunters would be, in that kind of range where you’re working hard but may not be pulling a sled for 12 hours a day for weeks on end. And then, the lower end, the 26/16 from an athletic point of view, is designed for sprinters, so it’s more for greyhounds. They need a larger carbohydrate base and less fat. Right. Your higher endurance athletes, the way dogs metabolize fat and energy, they’ll use carbohydrates to get going, but then dogs have the ability to use free fatty acids, fats directly from their bloodstream as energy, and depending on the endurance of that activity, the amount of fat required will vary to keep the dog moving. So, greyhounds, they’re doing short-duration sprints, 26/16 is all they need. They need the carbohydrates to get going. They don’t necessarily need the high-fat levels. For longer endurance athletes, like hunters and sled dogs, that’s where those diets really come in.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Emily Corey: They are different.

Ramsey Russell: What would happen if I gave a dog like Char, the 32/32?

Emily Corey: You’d be just fine. You just have to feed them less, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Emily Corey: It’s 720 kilocalories per cup. So, it’s dense, dense, dense. All the nutrition is in a lesser volume. That’s another benefit, right. Like if you’re in the woods, let’s say, for days on end and you’ve got to carry around your dog food, less is more. Right? It’s less weight. It’s less volume, but it still keeps the dog fueled on the lesser volume.

Ramsey Russell: I asked you that question because I was so enthralled when I started feeding Char. I mean, we go hard. We’ve been on the road for eight weeks, hunting five or six days a week. I said, “I’m going to jump on the 32/32.” If this mid-level 30/25 is good, the 32/32 is going to be really good. And boy, she thicken up. I mean, it was like wow. But what I learned, to your point, is that I couldn’t feed her as much. And you know, that’s almost like animal cruelty, scaling back a lab’s diet. I don’t think they care about nutrition. They just want to eat volume.

Emily Corey: Grew up with labs.

Ramsey Russell: So, I found a good balance going back to that mid-level you’re talking about, you know, and it’s just, she loves it.

Emily Corey: Yeah. I don’t have, you know, working dogs per se at this point, but I have two Border Collies. We go on 10-day hikes sometimes in the woods around here. They’re usually on the either the 30/25. One’s getting a little bit old, so we’re on the 26/16 now. But when we go hiking, they’re carrying their pack, and we’re packing 32/32.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Emily Corey: Because they need less volume.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a pretty small breed of dog, a Border Collie. I’ve heard they’re one of the Smartest breeds.

Emily Corey: For better or for worse. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I was thinking the same thing. My granddaddy said that to get along with a dog or to teach him, you’ve got to be smarter than he is. I don’t know if I’m as smart, as a Border Collie.

Emily Corey: I’m not sure I am in most cases.

Ramsey Russell: Matter of fact, somebody was telling me just the other day that they can learn 600 words. Do you find that to be true, having raised.

Emily Corey: You know what? You can tell them. They know the difference between a stick, a ball, a frisbee. These dogs know basically what I’m going to say. They come up and smell my pants in the morning and know whether or not I’m going to work or whether we’re going to go do fun things. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Emily Corey: Without a joke. The two of them will come up, and they will smell my pants when I put them on in the morning.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Emily Corey: And they will either go lie down or head to the door.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They’re smart like that. Char is kind of the same way. She watches me in the mornings with one eye.

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: “Char is kind of the same way. She watches me in the mornings with one eye. Something I do, something I put on, something I pick up, boom, she’s at the door waiting, ready to go hunt.”

Ramsey Russell: It’s some little change. It’s like I can go in and out of the room five times in the morning, but something I do, something I put on, something I pick up, boom, she’s at the door waiting, ready to go hunt. The dog never barks until we’re going hunting.

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And the whole way to the hunt, she’s barking. She’s ready to roll. Funny dog. Tell me a little bit, Emily, about how and why the local source ingredients for Inukshuk. It’s a phenomenal food. I’m starting to see, back home in the United States, more people raising athletic dogs and feeding them Inukshuk. But it’s almost like, if you know, you know. There’re feeding there dogs. It’s crazy how many people I talk to who are now feeding Inukshuk compared to anything else. I know that you are what you eat. Talk a little about you all’s proprietary process and, as importantly, the local sourced ingredients.

Emily Corey: One of the things that we believe in is fresher is better. So, you know, we’re on the East Coast. We have some unique supply chains that other people may not be able to access quite as well for that reason. So, given that we are in the Maritime Provinces, there’s a lot of fishing that happens right around here. We source a lot of herring, whitefish, you know, a lot of stuff from the ocean that is local to here. And we use a lot of it because it’s rich in omega-3s, it’s a good protein source, it’s highly digestible to dogs. But it gives you some of those advantages just in, I’m going to say, freshness, really, like we talk about the ocean being an hour away from here. We get our fish from an hour away from here. Same thing with grains and whatnot. We get them as local as we can because it allows. It’s fresher. It’s more likely to be sooner from the crop. It’s not the right word, but you know where I’m going with that. It’s a local connection. And being the only real producer out here, there’s some supply advantages to us for that reason. You know, its freshness. It also comes into how we sell the product. So, we sell it direct to the customer again for that reason. So, it’s not sitting in some warehouse for an extended period of time before it goes to a store to be sold out to you. And who knows how much time goes from when it was manufactured to when you’re actually feeding that food. Ours, if you’re buying from us, its weeks, if that, we’re busy here, but it goes straight out of our door, straight to your reseller or wherever you’re buying it. So, it’s a very short period of time from when it’s made to when you’re actually feeding the food.

Ramsey Russell: What is it about the fish, the herring, the salmon, and some of these other aquatic ingredients? What specifically is it about the omegas that converts into rocket fuel and a health elixir for high-performance animals?

Emily Corey: A lot of it is the actual content of fat. So, coming out of an industry where you’re dealing with fish that are underwater and how fat separates from water, the way that you get that energy into the fish and not have it just float on the surface is that the fat needs to be inside of the kibble, or the pellet in that case, rather than on the outside, right. Most pet food manufacturers, the way that they make food is by extruding the kibble, they make the unoiled product, and then they coat it. Right. So, if you’re coating the outside, you can really only get.

Ramsey Russell: So, it’s running down a conveyor belt, and it’s just getting doused with a little oil or something.

Emily Corey: Yep. Yeah, it’d be a fat chamber, but it would be circled around a little bit. But really, if it’s on the outside, you can only get 20%, maybe 21% fat in it without it getting too greasy. Ours, where we get the 25% to the 32%, that’s by using, literally, it’s a vacuum fat infusion chamber is what it is. But we do that same process, and then we suck all the air out of the chamber, and then we slowly let it back in. But what that does is it takes those fats from the outside and pulls them into the center of the kibble. So, another thing you’ll notice, some people will put water in their food, and most pet foods will float or sink.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Something else I noticed, because I do, for some reason, when she’s thirsty, she’ll drink. But I want my dog hydrated, you know, because it’s warm out here today. It’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit out here today. She’s been going hard. And if I put a bowl of water down, she may or may not drink because she wants to do something else. I put her on top of her food, she’s gonna drink it.

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And what I’ve noticed is the food sinks. But I’ve noticed if I come back 15, 20 minutes later, it’s not mush. It’s not a paste anyway. It’s still dog food sitting in there.

Emily Corey: Yeah. That’s because all of those little spaces in the kibble that would typically be filled with air are filled with oil. So, it takes a lot longer for that water to actually penetrate into the center of the kibble.

Ramsey Russell: How much different, like you said, your dad went and met with some scientists to come up with those three formulas. What was the difference in terms of fat and ingredients and stuff that went in from the fish food that the sled dog guy was, man, getting better results than any dog food on the market at the time, to the actual dog food? What was the calibration change and what was the process change involved?

Emily Corey: “Salmon feed can be a little bit higher in protein and a little bit higher in fat. So, we, in theory, can infuse a dog food with a higher fat percentage.”

Emily Corey: It’s the same process. It’s the exact same process. Salmon feed can be a little bit higher in protein and a little bit higher in fat. So, we, in theory, can infuse a dog food with a higher fat percentage than what we’re currently doing with the 32. It’s not really necessary, nor have we had a request for it. The 32 is pretty, a pretty good level for the end user. The thing is, when you get into the higher fat diets, you kind of have to know what you’re doing because you’re not, If you’ve got somebody that’s been feeding a grocery store brand, let’s say in a low fat, who thinks a cup of dog food is a cup of dog food, they’re going to have big problems with 32/32. That’s going to go straight through. But the education when you get into these more specialty diets is important, right. You have to know what you’re doing.

Ramsey Russell: Well, one thing I’ve noticed, and I’ve heard this from other people that feed a Inukshuk also, is you all talk about it being one of the most digestible dog foods on the market, but I’ve just noticed that two cups in and a lot less out than feeding other commercial like you say a            grocery store food. I mean, those foods are a lot of bulk as compared to you all. Is that by design?

Emily Corey: Well, first its yes, you’re feeding less is going in, so naturally you’re going to have less that comes out, right. Just with the higher energy density of the product. But the other thing that we do that comes out of our old industry, that we apply to dog food, which works quite well, you know, if you go and you look at a lot of standard grocery store, let’s say dog foods, you can see the little granules in it. You can see, you know, little bits of corn or a little bit of this here or there, and you don’t get that with us. We have a nice, consistent-looking kibble. And that is because we grind everything down to the consistency of essentially flour. And that will give you so, the way that your digestive system works is you chew things so that you have smaller particles, right. That’s what Dogs do that. We do that. But the smaller the particle is, the transit time from mouth to the rear end is relatively fixed. But the smaller particle means that there’s more surface area for the digestive enzymes to actually get at the particle, right. So, there’s less chunks that are likely to come out the back end because you can get more out of it because you use a finer grind.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve noticed that a lot of your competitors, and I’m funny like this, and what do I know, But, you know, when I go into, look at the side of a cereal box, look at the ingredients. And if you look at a lot of dog food company ingredients, one of the primary ingredients is corn, not protein. What does that do to a dog’s performance and health?

Emily Corey: Here’s the thing. It depends on how you use it.

Ramsey Russell: “Because it’s bad for human health.

Ramsey Russell: Because it’s bad for human health.

Emily Corey: Depends on how you use it. So corn as an ingredient, if it’s cooked and finely ground, is up to, I think it’s 92% digestible to a canine. So it is really digestible as a carbohydrate source. I think where corn gets a bad rep is that there’s corn gluten that can be used, which is protein, which is not necessarily as digestible or good for the dog as an animal protein would be, especially in the performance space. It can be overused. Right. It can be your first ingredient. And really, we’re dealing with an omnivore, but we want our protein to come from animal sources.

Emily Corey: We use corn. We use corn in our original three formulas, and I believe wholeheartedly that when it’s used as a carbohydrate, which is how we use it, and not as protein and not as anything else, it is a good ingredient. But when it’s your first ingredient, when you need, when it’s your first ingredient, when you’re using it primarily as a protein source, it’s not going to be as biologically available as fish or chicken would be, let’s say, as examples.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I get what you’re saying. Yeah. I just don’t think it ought to be a primary ingredient. Not the first ingredient.

Emily Corey: No.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to make a dog food or a pet food out of corn, and then I’m going to supplement it with some of these other little things. It doesn’t make sense. And I see it expressed in the pile out in the backyard. It just runs right through them, and it doesn’t sustain them like you were saying earlier about the protein and fat. It doesn’t give them any recovery for their muscles. It doesn’t give them any endurance. Carbohydrates just burn quick like a candle, boom.

Emily Corey: It’s energy.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just quick energy, and it’s gone. That’s why you get these rises and falls in their metabolism.

Emily Corey: Yeah, but it’s not going to offer you the same sort of sustained energy level as fat would or the muscle recovery or endurance you get out of protein.

Ramsey Russell: How is Inukshuk distributed? You’ve got an interesting distribution model, I’m going to say. I can’t go to Walmart or Cabela’s. I can’t go to a big box store. I can’t go to a grocery store and buy Inukshuk professional dog food. Will I ever be or is that by design?

Emily Corey: That’s by design.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me about this.

Emily Corey: So, going back to our roots of dealing with mushers, think a guy with 200 dogs in the woods of Alaska. By the time we make the product, sell it to a distributor who sells it to a retail store who sells it to the guy, it gets really expensive. And if you’ve got a lot of dogs, that’s a big bill.

Emily Corey: The way that we designed this was direct to customer. Buy the pallet, 65 bags at a time. So what we do is we manufacture it here. We have a series of warehouses in the lower 48, up in Alaska, and in Canada. And we talk to customers directly and sell it to them. But a) it keeps that product fresher, like we were talking about earlier, and b) it keeps that price much more reasonable for our end user.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But it can be. A lot of the boys I know back home south of the border in America, they either go online and buy the bag, and it’s very comparably priced to anybody else out there, only better. And I’m saying that because Char Dog is fueled by Inukshuk, and I won’t swap foods to anything else or they can buy it bulk from you all. I mean, I was just hunting ducks with Matt Wilson down the road here, and several times throughout the day, locals would stop by. He’ll buy it by the pallet and sell it. You all do have kind of, it’s a direct-to-consumer model. But you all, what would you call a guy like Matt, a local distributor?

Emily Corey: “We call them resellers.

Emily Corey: We call them resellers.

Ramsey Russell: Resellers?

Emily Corey: Yep. We allow people to resell it. You know, for your entrepreneurial spirits. It is another avenue of revenue for some people because there’s lots of room to make a little bit of money to at least feed your own dogs for free. But it can work as an avenue that way as well, yeah. But originally, for freshness and price, allowing people to resell it expands that network. For guys who need a bag, they can either buy it online, buy the bag, or go on our web page, find their local reseller, and probably get a better price than if they were buying directly from Master or Brim Tui or wherever they’re getting it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty smart. I know, of course, your trainers buy by the pallet.

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What is the most popular formula, let’s just say, for an American field trial handler? Would it be the Marine 25?

Emily Corey: Marine 25 or 30, 25. Yeah. The middle one there. Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Yep. Do you sell a lot here? What I’m trying to ask is, who do you sell the most dog food to now? With all these sporting breeds, I’m thinking duck dogs, that’s just my mindset. But that’s not the only performance animal you all are selling to.

Emily Corey: No, it’s a wide rangenow. We feed everything from sled dogs, as we talked about, to duck dogs, to upland dogs. A lot of upland guys, a lot of canine handlers, and a lot of police dogs. Any dogs with jobs, really. There’s some more recreational use, but a lot of it is professional working dogs.

Ramsey Russell: What does it mean to you as a company and as a person, being the president of Cory Nutrition, to be direct-to-consumer and make yourselves more personally available for that interpersonal relationship with the end user?

Emily Corey: It’s huge. Especially dealing with a niche product. We had an idea going into this that there were a variety of different dogs with jobs, let’s say, but not nearly to the extent that there actually are out there. Like, we get people every week that call in, and we’re like, You’re doing what with your dog? You do what? Constantly. It’s an amazing world out there of working professionals that hunt, sniff out bed bugs, detect cancer, you name it. We’ve got people calling in who are doing these really impressive things with their animals.

Ramsey Russell: It helps you keep your finger on the pulse of what the dogs need.

Emily Corey: “The feedback that we get is incredible. If we were going through big box stores, forget it. We wouldn’t get the information, not like we do now, about what the actual needs of the animals are and what people are using this for. It’s huge.”

Emily Corey: Yeah. And the feedback that we get is incredible. If we were going through big box stores, forget it. We wouldn’t get the information, not like we do now, about what the actual needs of the animals are and what people are using this for. It’s huge. The relationship is massive.

Ramsey Russell: It’s important to me as a business owner, a very, very small company owner. It’s very important to me to speak personally to each of my clients. My wife and I speak to every single one of our clients. And it’s very, very important to me, they’re my lifeblood. This is a relationship.

Emily Corey: Yeah, it really is.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t need a corporate veil and just mass sales. I need relationships with my people. We’ve evolved over the last 20-something years. We continue to evolve based on what the clients need or expect. And I guess you all are the same way.

Emily Corey: Absolutely. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve mentioned freshness, and we’re just about to wrap up, Emily. But you mentioned freshness, and I forgot to ask you, you all have an interesting dog food bag concept. Like, I’m sitting here looking at a stack of them behind me, and it’s, boy, it’s like it’s vacuum-sealed.

Emily Corey: It’s not vacuum-sealed, I will clarify that. But yes, it’s a coffee bag, think of it like a coffee bag. So we have foil-lined bags with a one-way air valve on them. It’s very intentional. It’s not the cheapest bag you’re going to get out there, you can get bags for much cheaper. But we use these because, again, freshness. That thing is not breathing. We don’t vacuum-seal them, but they get stacked on a pallet, and the air comes out and doesn’t come back in. That air is what oxidizes the fats and makes the food go rancid. So we don’t want that happening. We intentionally use these bags that allow us to stack them, because that’s always a thing too. You can’t just have a pillow because they’ll explode, but it keeps the food fresher for longer.

Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting. How did you all come up with that idea? I mean, was that just like, Man, we need to do something? Because of me, it’s ingenious. I don’t see anybody else doing it.

Emily Corey: It’s very rare, and the big boys likely won’t because it’s a much more expensive pathway to go down. But, you know, when we’re selling 65 bags at a time, for some people, that’s a year’s supply of dog food, right. We want that last bag to be just as fresh as that first bag, or at least as fresh as we can possibly keep it, that lifespan.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. For dog performance and health performance.

Emily Corey: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What’s next for Inukshuk?

Emily Corey: That’s a big question.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Emily Corey: Right now, we are in refinement mode. We are finding better ways to do things around here and being more efficient. So we’re investing in ourselves right now and getting some new equipment to make that product come off the line faster and just as you would expect it to be every time.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, I’m going to team up with Daniel here in a minute and walk through the facilities and get a grand tour. I’m excited for that. Can you tell everybody listening how to connect with Inukshuk, how to find out more information, and where to go to do a deeper dive or to purchase this?

Emily Corey: The easiest way is to go on our webpage, which is Inukshukpro.com. So I-N-U-K-S-H-U-K-P-R-O dot com. That’s where you’ll find all our information. You can email us, you can call us. We do answer our phones between 8 and 5 Atlantic Time. But if you leave us a message, we are not calling after hours, we’ll get back to you the next day. We’re accessible and we love talking to people.

Ramsey Russell: And last question, because Inukshuk is a funny, a memorable, but funny name, and the logo is even more unique, what the heck is an Inukshuk?

Emily Corey: This is a Canadian thing, so most Canadians would understand this is, but Americans often struggle with it a little bit. So, given we originated with sled dogs, this little stone man we use as the emblem is called an Inukshuk. When you’re up north running dogs without trees or any sort of real landscape features, everything’s white. These things are often built to point directions or historically have been built to point to towns and directions. They also serve as caches for food or supplies buried at the base.

Ramsey Russell: How tall are they in real life?

Emily Corey: They can be quite tall. Taller than me.

Ramsey Russell: Because the snow gets pretty deep, I’m guessing to run sled dogs.

Emily Corey: Yeah, they vary, but they can be substantial.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much, Emily.

Emily Corey: Oh, thanks for having me.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve enjoyed it. I appreciate the information. Folks, you all have been listening to Emily Corey, president of Inukshuk Professional Dog Food, aka Cory Nutrition. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast. Check them out. Take my word for it, char dogs’ performance doesn’t lie. See you next time.