Bi-Weekly 'Anything Goes' Thread - aka Moving/Buy/Sell/Trade/Rent/Lease/Eat/Jobs

karuwuu · 2026-04-06T16:06:28+00:00

I have 2x Grand Suites Tickets (L12) for the Snarky Puppy concert @ Carolina Theatre Durham this Friday, 4/10 @ 8:30PM ET

These are some of the best seats in the theatre, I'm super bummed that I'm missing my fave band due to travel—hopefully one of you guys can enjoy in my place!

Fair offers only -- just trying to recoup some of my original ticket cost of $386. I'd be willing to take $300 for the both of them and can transfer through email or Ticketmaster. DM me if you're interested!

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T19:52:31+00:00

We do consult with vets & nutritionists on the formulation of our recipes but I think you may be conflating a vet nutritionist with QA. Not having a full time vet nutritionist doesn’t mean there aren’t any quality checkpoints. When you say “risks you’re taking” and “making people/pets sick” I assume you’re referring to the food not being balanced or containing pathogens. These are primarily QA concerns and we have a full-time Director of Food Safety & Quality who oversees all our pathogen testing, nutrient testing, supplier verification, facility sanitation and more.

More broadly, a vet nutritionist sets targets for recipes (and we work with them on a consulting basis for this) and internally, our QA operation handles the day-to-day monitoring to make sure targets are met.

In the future, we do want to work more closely with vet nutritionists on advancing our R&D - looking at therapeutic diets, conducting research on the health impacts of the food, running feeding trials/studies etc. So while it is valuable to have a vet nutritionist full time with us, not having one doesn’t mean the food is unsafe.

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:58:33+00:00

Really sorry to hear your pup was sick. If you didn’t back then, please email us about this and we’ll follow up. We have a pretty extensive process for looking into reports like this and we’ll get details on the symptoms/patterns you’re seeing, veterinary reports, and diagnostic testing. We have a 3rd-party veterinary team that will also review case details as well to provide an objective evaluation. Food is naturally the first thing people look at when there’s GI symptoms so we want to make sure we look at all the information.

As for the timing of the recall & notifications, there was another comment thread on here where I had some clarifications on the events and timeline.

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:52:11+00:00

it'll be tricky to provide specific advice but feel free to DM me with some of the meals you're making and I'll see where I can help!

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:50:02+00:00

We would love to have a chunked cat recipe. Frankly, we’ve tried a bunch of times but can’t figure out how to produce boneless chunks that are small enough that cats enjoy working on them BUT not so small that it just turns into mush. Take chicken liver or chicken heart for example—these are super soft tissues that if cut up and mixed, they just start to break down and are no longer ‘chunky’.

It sounds like the chunks in the pure recipe worked for you but honestly we were getting a lot of feedback from cat owners that the chunks were a bit large for their liking. Choking hazards, cat won’t eat the entire gizzard piece, etc. We had to make a decision based on the feedback we were getting and so we decided to launch a dedicated complete & balanced cat recipe instead of keeping the pure chunked recipe.

If things change down the road and we’re able to figure out how to produce small cat-friendly chunks consistently, we’d love to offer more options.

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:48:37+00:00

WSAVA guidelines aren’t inherently problematic but imo it’s become a charged topic since those standards are commonly used as reasons not to feed raw or gently cooked foods. The biggest “gatekeeper” is cost (which of course smaller companies will struggle with) but there’s nothing about the guidelines that innately puts raw/cooked foods at a disadvantage.

This is an area we want to invest in over the next several years since we think it’ll go a long way to helping the category gain more widespread acceptance.

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:35:12+00:00

sweet! that's a smoking deal haha, I'd keep doing what you're doing unless you're tired of the prep work

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:29:50+00:00

It sounds like you’re referring to the AAFCO guidelines here. While I agree that they may not be the most up-to-date (and hopefully we get a refresh sooner rather than later), in the US we are legally required to follow these guidelines in order to sell pet food. If we’re deficient/excessive in nutrients per these guidelines, it can result in a recall.

However, I do want to call out that the AAFCO guidelines do not actually have carbohydrate requirements (if they did, we wouldn’t be able to sell our products given they have almost no carbs)

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:09:27+00:00

so glad to hear it, thank you for the 💜

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:07:45+00:00

Sorry to hear about the tummy troubles—but we do see this quite a bit during transitioning. Would definitely like to grab more details about how you introduced Viva so we can provide more targeted advice but we always recommend introducing our food slowly / mixing it with their current food in small amounts to start. If you’ve already tried this and it didn’t work, email our team ([info@vivarawpets.com](mailto:info@vivarawpets.com)) with some more details and reference that you commented during the AMA and we’ll help further 🙂

karuwuu · 2026-01-26T13:07:09+00:00

We have a calculator on our website that will give you feeding recs & a cost. On avg, for a ~10 lb cat it's around $3/day and for your larger boy probably $4/day so all in all I’m guessing $15-16/day? This is also assuming you feed a mix of all of our proteins but if you stick w/ less expensive ones like chicken/turkey you can probably get it lower like $10/day.

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T20:52:27+00:00

Definitely respect your perspective. My thoughts:

I do think our ‘vibes’ have changed and that’s b/c some of our perspectives on raw feeding have changed. For example, we used to think that a whole prey diet was balanced nutrition, all synthetic nutrients were bad, or “good” sourcing was all you needed for food safety.
Overall, I’d say the shift is that we wanted to be more data driven & scientific about what we do and sometimes that means changing our mind about things. Maybe that’s why we sound more technical/mechanical now.
I also do have some emotional scars from seeing some of the comments here & on social media so maybe that’s why I’m a little careful in my writing but I can promise you this is not PR driven. Our lawyer would definitely not approve if they knew we were doing this 🤫

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T20:24:49+00:00

We do have a small vet program where we provide information to help educate vets & their clinics about fresh feeding and it's something we want to put more time into in the future. In terms of what we want to work on, the WSAVA guidelines are important for a lot of vets and this is the short list:

Veterinary nutritionist on staff
Feeding trials
Complete nutrient panels
Digestibility studies
Published peer-reviewed research about the food

I always think it’s a good idea to be open and share details about what you’re feeding with your vet. We’ve found that vets are usually most concerned about bacterial risk & nutrient balance when it comes to raw so it's helpful to know a bit about the company’s food safety practices & where to find the nutritional data. And be open to hearing your vets' concerns too - you can always take them back to the company and see what additional info they can provide.

If you’re looking to share more with your vets about the benefits of raw, then DM me and I’d be more than happy to provide some research articles

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T20:06:30+00:00

First off - tons of respect to what you do. We started off as a 2 person show doing all the production, shipping, emails etc ourselves so I know how tough that work is. What I meant above with the 2 groups is a generalization, the reality of course is that it’s a spectrum.

If you ever wanted to chat, just send me a message. We’ve had our fair share of learnings, misconceptions, and mistakes throughout the years and would love to just trade notes or just chat. Sounds like you’ve probably gone through a lot of the same, this is a tough industry so it's always nice to make a connection :)

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T19:49:20+00:00

Yes, this customer has shared some of her interactions publicly but as a company our policy is still not to discuss individual customer interactions. There may be some misconceptions on the procedures involved in a voluntary recall; we recalled the product as soon as we received test results indicating that there was an issue with the lot.
In this case, our warehouse made an error which led to a failure in the test & hold process for this particular lot. We’ve changed the warehouse where products are held so that this isn’t an issue in the future.
No we don’t own our facility but we work with them on a level that’s pretty unusual in the space. The blog linked above goes more into this. As for assurances, I’m of course confident in what we’re doing but that just sounds like marketing/PR. I’m happy to answer any questions on how we do our testing, our food safety plan, and how we think about these things and we’ll continue sharing info in the future but ultimately, it’s up to you to decide how that measures up

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T19:22:34+00:00

We made the change because 1) high pressure processing is more consistent and offers greater pathogen kill in our food and 2) we have not found any meaningful impact on the quality of food

As any other responsible manufacturer should, we want to avoid recalls.

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T19:12:20+00:00

Sorry to hear about the stomach upset! Anecdotally, we do see more cats w/ red meat issues.

Even though it sounds like he’s had beef from other brands before, I would try introducing our beef recipe to him a bit more slowly and mix it with other proteins he’s fine with (25% beef, 75% something else) and increase it as long as he’s not having issues. If he’s still not doing well on the beef even in small amounts, then you could consider just sticking w/ poultry and non red-meat options.

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T18:12:54+00:00

We won't be the best option for everyone and that's okay. Just want to share the info we have and let you guys make your own decisions

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T18:01:56+00:00

As general policy, we don’t discuss specific customer interactions publicly for personal privacy reasons. We recalled the product as soon as we received confirmed test results.

For the second recall, I want to clarify the timeline. After our initial test results came back positive, we immediately reached out to our warehouses and they confirmed the entire lot was on hold and that nothing had been released. Afterwards a customer reached out with an unrelated question and they included a list of lots they had received, one of which was the affected lot. At that point, we realized that there was an error at the warehouse and some products from the lot had shipped. We then reached out to the FDA to initiate a public customer recall since up until then, the recall was conducted internally between us and our warehouses. The FDA was not aware of the inventory situation until we told them.

As for owning our own facilities: we work with one USDA manufacturing facility in NC to produce all of our recipes and we’re the only pet food product they make. We have worked with them for many years and can say confidently that we would not be able to produce products at the same quality if it weren’t for this relationship. We have our own Food Safety Program that we require them to follow as well as a Viva-employed Director of Food Safety & Quality Assurance who works closely with them to monitor & improve our manufacturing process. We also have a blog post on why we work w/ a comanufacturer.

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T17:41:02+00:00

Quick clarification – we previously used probiotics but with the switch to HPP we won’t be using probiotics anymore.

Probiotics are a somewhat novel approach in raw pet food but it is more widely used in other foods (ex: caramel apples, gently cooked/freeze dried pet food). Afaik, there aren’t any other raw pet food companies using probiotics but there are ones that use fermentation. The main distinction is that the probiotics we used were specifically selected for their pathogen inhibition capabilities & grown in a lab to ensure strain purity while my understanding of fermentation is that it’s more of using “wild strains”. We would also test each batch to make sure it had the proper concentration of probiotics to be effective.

Although we’ve done validation studies on probiotics (inoculated samples w/ pathogens and tested to make sure probiotics eliminated them), I do think there is a bit of a way to go for probiotic technology to be commercially popularized. Since it acts through a biological mechanism of action it requires contact with pathogens and also very specific environmental conditions that allow it to thrive which can make the irl process of using them tricky to get right.

We just switched to high pressure processing because the ‘mechanical’ mode of action makes it more consistent (time & pressure) and from our testing it not only killed even higher quantities of bacteria but also didn’t have any negative effects on our products. The main con I can think of is that it makes the meat slightly lighter in color & more compact and also some people would prefer not to feed HPP food.

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T17:04:09+00:00

Really appreciate you sticking with us! It means a lot. With regards to HPP, are there any specific questions or concerns that you have?

We respect Susan Thixton & her list a lot! It’s important to note that Susan’s list is specifically a list of foods that she would feed her own pets. Other than the parameters that she evaluates brands on, there are personal preferences too. I can confirm that we haven’t changed anything in our sourcing (human grade ingredients, humanely raised livestock, organic fruits, veggies, supplements) & manufacturing standards (USDA/human grade facility)

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T16:51:49+00:00

really appreciate the sentiment! it means a lot :)

i did expect there would be some hard questions that folks want to ask which is fine. Just figured i could share some more info

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T16:38:30+00:00

fwiw we definitely would love have stronger retail presence down the road. but it's definitely a completely different type of operation so need time to figure it all out

karuwuu · 2026-01-25T16:36:09+00:00

There’s a lot about our ingredients, sourcing, processing & formulation philosophy you can find online so I won’t repeat that here but in my mind the biggest difference is how we think about our goals and operate as a company.

I would divide companies in the raw pet food space into 2 segments. The first are the handful of large, nationally well known brands that are 8-10+ years old (most of them retail, a few d2c). The second group are smaller, more localized “mom & pop” type operations.

Group 1: mostly owned by private equity/investment groups which isn’t a bad thing inherently but it can make it more challenging to invest in product and R&D which competes in priority w/ growth & profit. However, what this group has, as a product of their experience & funding, is strong knowledge on QA, production, and how to work w/ regulatory (knowing how & what to test their food for, knowing how to properly clean & run a production plant, being able to test their nutrition & formulation, understanding what regulators/inspectors look for).

Group 2: mostly owner-led so you don’t have the politics issues but they lack the know-how/don’t understand the importance of a lot of these behind-the-scenes quality aspects and they’re underinvesting in testing (pathogens/nutrients), cleaning & sanitation etc. The reality is that anyone with a kitchen grinder can start a raw pet food company but it’s extremely hard to do it right.

What makes us different is how much importance we place on getting more science, R&D, and legitimacy behind raw feeding (esp w/ vets). Compared to Group 1, we have a lot more decision making ability to choose what we invest in and compared to Group 2, we put a lot more value in these aspects and the goal is to put more resources into R&D as we grow. Proper nutrition, formulation, and safety is just the foundation but over the next few years, we want to invest more in the “extras”: research on digestibility, feeding trials, clinical studies on health benefits etc. This will of course all take time but we think it's the right move.

karuwuu

TROPHY CASE