Pumpkin, sweet potato would give dogs extra vitamins

Are you ready for organic, all-vegetable dog food? Stahlbush Island Farms is betting you are.

The Corvallis company is introducing the groundbreaking product today at a pet-food industry trade show in Las Vegas.

Nummy Tum-Tum comes in 15-ounce cans and two flavors — pumpkin and sweet potato — and it’s 100 percent organic.

As far as the company knows, no one else in the country has attempted to crack the mass market for vegetarian dog chow.

“I think the market is there, and nobody has acted on it,” said Bill Chambers, president of the family-owned business.

About a year in the planning, today’s product launch came in response to customer requests, said Karla Chambers, the company’s vice president.

It turned out that some customers were already buying Stahlbush Island Farms’ high-end vegetable purees — which have always been marketed as people food — to give their animals an extra shot of fiber, vitamin A and beta carotene.

“The only thing different is the label,” Karla Chambers said. “Labeling for the pet-food market has turned out to be more challenging than labeling for the human market.”

The product is pitched as “a nutritious food supplement” on the label, which features a cute drawing of a fat and happy puppy.

The push to launch Nummy Tum-Tum is something of a shot in the dark, Karla Chambers said, because there’s no established market for vegetable dog food, but the company was already producing pumpkin and sweet-potato purees at its Corvallis processing plant, so it seemed like a gamble worth taking.

“There are more pets than children in U.S. households,” Karla Chambers noted. And many of those households are buying organic foods for themselves, so why not their pets?

“We want to hit and penetrate that niche market,” Karla Chambers said. “We also want to penetrate that mainstream market.”