As I was preparing a batch of ground green tripe today, getting ready for all the weekend orders (Saturday’s are nuts over at Bold Canine/Bold Raw as many folks do their weekly pickups) Caroline came home with a pack of ‘green tripe’ she picked up at a raw food store in the city as market research.

I was completely floored by the lack of quality to the product she purchased, and incensed me to the point to need to write a blog article about it (although I need to get back to packaging lol!).

When I recently left the corporate world to follow my passion of working with and for animals, I was committed to providing only the highest quality of product.  Coming from an ISO-9000 background, I believe in processes and quality control.  To both Caroline and I, there is no room in the world for mediocre businesses, and if you’re going to create something it should either be the absolute best, or shouldn’t be done at all.  And more so if you’re promoting healthy foods over canned slop or dry cardboard (aka kibble).

Within our pack of six Shiloh Shepherds, who basically are our four legged children, we only feed them the absolute best possible quality of everything.  We want them to be as healthy as the can be, and although they are Grand Champions in the show ring, it has always been more important that they be Champions of health above all else.  It’s with this vision and passion that we created Bold Raw - Natural Raw Food for Dogs and Cats.  We felt that there was a desire in the pet food world for premium quality products, and noticed that those that were doing it, were either just retails and not involved with the quality control of production, or just doing it as a hobby to sell enough to provide their own pack with food - no commitment, no passion, no quality.

It was with this vision of producing the best that I was so disturbed by the product Caroline picked up at the store, and I’ll explain why.

The photo at the top had the store bought product on the left, and the batch I had just ground 30 minutes earlier on the right.  If you cannot tell, or have not dealt much with tripe, the product on the left is very white - and with tripe there is only one thing that white and it’s hardened pure fat!

Although the label (which I could not show) states 17% fat MINIMUM it’s actually contents I would guess is closer to 40-50% pure fat - if not more!

So how do you get around this?  Easy, you take the painstaking time and you trim away the excess fat.  We at Bold Raw do this by hand, and although it’s a labourious process, it truly provides an ‘ultimate tripe’.   It requires some extra steps including chilling the tripe to harden the fat, and then trimming section by section.  And it’s likely why some sell tripe at a price of $1.50 per pound - sure, because it’s junk.

Fat has no benefit in green tripe as it’s NOT from the stomach itself - there is NO fat inside the stomach walls and all this hard useless fat is located on the OUTSIDE of the stomach, exterior from the organ, and contains none of the benefits that green tripe has to offer.

Producers that include so much fat simply do so out of convenience.  The entire tripe is simply dumped into the grinder and away it goes.  Reducing labour costs, and getting their maximum yield, but not creating the best possible product.

This is the tripe we ground today.  I’d put the fat content at less than 5% (it’s near impossible to remove it all).  There are a few white spots in there, the rest if nice pink/brown/dark stomach meats.  So when our customers serve their dogs green tripe, that’s what they’re getting - not useless filler which actually can do more harm than good.

This photo shows just a handful (this is about 3 lbs worth) of fat trimmed from just half of a single tripe!  That hard white lard like fat has no benefits to your dog, and will serve nothing more than helping making him or her obese and unhealthy.

I’ve said before, I wouldn’t feed my pack anything that I wouldn’t eat myself (well, I wouldn’t eat green tripe myself - but that’s just because we’re not designed to).  Would you eat this fat?  So why should the dog or cat that relies on you for their health eat it?

I didn’t write this blog entry to bolster just how great our product is (although I truly feel it is the absolute best it can be - otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it), but rather to illustrate that even within the world of raw, there are varying qualities of product available and not all raw producers are created equal.

Dave,

Bold Raw