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Naturally Wild

Rebekah Harrison//June 8, 2015//

Naturally Wild

Rebekah Harrison //June 8, 2015//

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We spoke with Jeremy Peterson, executive vice president at Wild Calling about the company’s special ingredients, family impact and upcoming new products.

Rebekah: Can you tell me a little about the history of Wild Calling?

Jeremy: We’re a family owned company. My dad, brother and I started the company and launched in 2013 at Global Pet Expo. We launched with a 97 percent meat can. Those did really well, a lot of stores brought them in. We started getting a lot of requests for a dry product from consumers and stores. We looked at the dry market and we said “How can we fit in?” so we developed a couple different concepts that ultimately came to be realized into two categories of dog food: Wild Calling Rocky Mountain Medley and Western Plain Stampede.

This year, we added a third category called Exotic Essentials, which is single-sourced protein diets with exotic meats like rabbit, kangaroo or bison.

Rebekah: Your motto is “a wildly different company.” How is Wild Calling unique?

Jeremy: For our Rocky Mountain Medley, we developed a concept of land, air and sea because red meats are deficient in arginine and histidine which are two of the 10 essential amino acids that a pet requires. By adding the air and sea proteins, we get all 10 essential amino acids in that pet’s diet. We think it’s the top of the nutrition pyramid, grain-free diet on the market.

Our Western Plain Stampede diets are single-sourced protein diets for pets with allergies. So for the pet owner who comes in with a pet who is allergic to this, that and the other, we put as few ingredients as possible into the food with just one protein source.
What makes our dry foods different is that when we put them together, we looked at the entire dry category and we said “What are companies doing that’s good and what is being done that is bad?” Grain-free is what people want nowadays so everything we make is grain-free. We also developed a concept called GlycoEdge, where we combined sweet potato, tapioca and lentils to help regulate a pet’s glucose and insulin levels. We came out with a high meat, low-carb grain-free food that used carbohydrates to help regulate that insulin level.

We’re just trying to come out and be as innovative as possible. We want to bring new solutions to fix old problems.

Rebekah: Wild Calling is a family owned company. Can you tell me how that has impacted the way you run things?

Jeremy: We try to put a personal touch on everything. If you call or email us, you’re going to get a member of my family. It’s a very personal and intimate, transparent and open business environment to kind of play into what people want nowadays. People want a human face on a company and we are trying to restore that.

Rebekah: Any new products in the works at Wild Calling?

Jeremy: We are going to launch a new brand of pet food called Zoic. It’s a grain-free food at a nice price point that will be heavily targeted to the millennial audience to help stores differentiate their offerings. We are launching this at SuperZoo.