We at The Light of Dog believe in being open and transparent about our supply chain and manufacturing processes.  It is one thing to make glowing statements on our packaging and website about the quality of our products, but we prove it by publishing detailed information about our practices.

This post provides information about the equipment we use to make our dog food products.  Since we are a small-batch producer, we do not need big commercial equipment.  Instead, we use commonly available kitchen appliances and accessories.

The Light of Dog Kitchen

We built a commercial kitchen for all of our food production. It is small, but since we only want to produce our products in small batches to maintain quality, and want to remain a small company, this size is working for us.

Refrigerators and Freezers

We use mostly large 22 cubic foot or larger freezer chests to store our raw ingredients and all of our finished goods.  Freezers are kept in the garage, which we have converted to inventory storage for our products. We monitor the temperature of the freezers through a secondary temperature device to make sure they maintain a temperature of 10 degrees or less.  We post temperature logs here.

We use small refrigerators to defrost frozen raw ingredients before production into finished goods.

Dehydrators

We use small commercial dehydrators with metal racks to do the drying of our products.  We use metal for any cooking of our products, not plastic.

Food Grinders and Processors

We use a meat grinder but not too often, as we have it done at our meat processors.

Our food processor is used to shred and mince vegetables and fruits.

The coffee grinder is for egg shells that we grind into powder for our Peak Power Raw Dog Food.

Knife Sharpener and Utensils

Sharp knives are indispensable, so we keep a quality knife sharpener on hand.

Weight Scale

We need to measure down to the gram and use a shelf scale that allows us to do that.

Yogurt Maker

We make our own yogurt for our products, allowing it to ferment for at least 24-hours.

Mixing Containers

We use a variety of stainless steel and plastic containers for mixing and storing food.  We do not do any cooking in plastic, only mixing and storing.  We would prefer to use stainless steel, but it is too cost prohibitive to replace all of our plastic ones with stainless steel.