This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Frozen yogurt dog treats are no barking matter. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome to the podcast. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. This segment, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
Now today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from Matt Meyer. He is the co-founder of a business that provides frozen treats for dogs in the form of healthy yet delicious supposedly ice cream. I don't know how he knows if it's delicious. If he does some taste testing himself, I guess it's probably not a big deal to do that. You know, it's just frozen yogurt treats.
You know, it's just that they're normally provided for dogs. So who knows, probably fine to do the taste test. That's not the focus of our update. We're gonna hear about the business side of this business, which has been going pretty well. We first featured it a long time ago.
Had a couple updates over the years. I believe like all through the pandemic, they kept going. I believe they're still being sold now on shelves, but I'll come back to that perhaps at the end. For now, let's pass the microphone to Matt. [Music]
I am Matt Meyer.
I'm from Longmont, Colorado. I am the co-founder and co-owner of The Bear and the Rat, cool treats for dogs with my wife, Meg. And I was previously featured on episode 384 of Side Hustle School. My wife and I, Meg, we produce and sell a pre-biotic frozen yogurt for dogs. It's a healthy version of ice cream for them that includes them in the ice cream ritual, but it's actually really good for their digestion and helps settle a lot of digestive issues actually.
We are made in a real ice cream facility. If you look at our ingredient deck, it is real ingredients for your dog. It's real yogurt. It's real bananas. It's real peanut butter.
And that's actually the one I always recommend to people is the banana and peanut butter. If you can think of smoothie, no sugar, that's exactly what you're getting. If you're thinking like a Ben and Jerry's or a Jenny's ice cream, you're gonna be pretty disappointed. But it's just a basic thing for them that they think they're getting ice cream, but it's actually good for them. And it actually is really good ingredients as well.
This was an idea in my head as a kid. My family would go for cones on Sunday, my brothers and sisters, and our little black poodle. And she would look at us like, excuse me, am I not a part of this family? And my dad, kind of being a jokester, would buy her a little baby cone with vanilla on top. It was the funniest thing that I remember as a kid, like my mom just laughing hysterically and families looking at us like, what a bunch of freaks.
But we really thought it was great. She was a part of our family, but when we got her home, the digestion, the heavy sugar, the cream, all that stuff, it just didn't sit right with her. So fast forward to my wife and I's honeymoon. We had our two dogs and she mentioned I wanna start our own thing. I mentioned this idea to her.
She was fearless and said, let's do it. We started making it in our kitchen and started selling at the local farmer's market. And it just kind of snowballed from there. And we've been in business 10 years, was last month. Prior to this, I was a sales rep for a natural food distributor.
And I worked for a couple of natural drinks companies as a sales rep as well. So I kind of knew the ins and outs of grocery, which was very helpful for learning how not only how distributors work, but how grocery brings in brands and just a lot of things that you can learn just being in that world. But yeah, now I've been doing this for the past four years as my main hustle, which has been awesome. Feel super lucky about that. Our biggest challenge at this moment is making sure our independent pet stores are known as a destination to pick us up as well.
These are the people that carried us first. And just because we have this growth doesn't mean that we forget about them and they're going through the roughest time right now. I would say in the pet industry, it is such a wonderful industry to be involved in. There's a lot of wonderful people, a lot of wonderful opportunities. So the pet industry is super fun.
If you're looking to follow the footsteps of I want to do a pet product, it's such a great industry to be in. And it's so, people love their pets. So we feel blessed not only to be a part of it, but to have such a unique product as well. I was so resistant to working with Meg when she wanted to, suggested this idea of starting our own business. I was so resistant to it, but we really are a good partnership.
When we're on together, we really click and add some crazy, crazy things. We're like, did that really happen? Did we really pull that on? [Laughter] So it's kind of cool. Having a good partner, it has helped that for sure.
[Music]
The bear on the rat.com. That is the website for these delicious, as I said, presumably dog treats made by Matt and company. They are also available for sale on Instacart, Amazon, Petco, PetSmart. There's a whole map on their website where you can plug in a city state or zip code. So presumably they're in lots of stores.
You can also buy the products direct. You can learn more about the business. The branding is just super fun. Just looks really cool. And as I said in the intro, they've been going for a while and are still going strong.
Matt, thank you for sharing those updates. Listeners, thank you for being out there as always. If you've got a question and update about your hustle, you know where to go, sidehustleschool.com/questions. You can also access notes, resources, links for all of the episodes, 3,000 plus. New episodes drop every day, wherever you get your shows.
That's it for now, but don't stop retrieving. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
