EP 21 - Dog Food Science with Next Level

this journey together. So today I'm with Brandon White from Next Level dog Food, And before we get into today's podcast, we've been talking here a lot about all of our buddies out in North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee and just all the things going on out there, and we just

want to wish off them the best. And you know, it's been really encouraging to see how the communities gathered around each other out there and how it's just Appalachians supporting Appalachians and then all the people that know them and are just helping out the best they can. And it's good to know that there's people on the ground out there that you can trust to be responsible with

the things that they were sent. We were just talking about how there's so many different organizations that pop up that really are asking for this, or that you just don't know who you can trust, especially with I mean, even some of the rules coming out of that area just are kind of kind of dumbfound you. It's been really great to see how the communities rallied around each other and just done a solid job of supporting each other.

So hats off to you guys. Today we're going to talk about kind of the science behind dog food and see what we can learn from just the production process and lean on a lot of the knowledge that brand and has. But first we want to find out some of his background and some of the background behind Next Level. So, hey, Brennan, going good, good, So give me some of your your background. I know you're a diehard tree guy, a treehound guy feiler,

and uh, how you got involved with Next Level. And before we get into that, I want to say that the way that the way that I got connected with you guys is uh is kind of not normal. My dad lives in the same town like I'm from, East Texas, where you guys are located your corporate headquarters and want your production plant. And uh, my dad saw somebody come in to the place that he was eating lunch that had Next Level on the on their polo, and he's like,

they need to talk to my son. So my dad's not pastful.

were blue tick folks. And on my dad's side, they were black and tans.

you know. And yeah, the joke is I can hunt my forty acres all night long and not worry about getting out of pocket. But uh, you know, I graduated high school back in uh from age You're back in nineteen eighty nine, went to the military, served in the army for eight years, got out and went to work driving a truck actually for a which is now called FedEx Freight, used to be American Freightways out of Harrison, Arkansas.

And you know, had had a pretty good hounder. I thought he was pretty good, and we won a little bit, and I was just enough of a redneck ram, just enough of redneck that won a bigger event. And dog would come say, man, when you were our hat, you know, put our logo on your ads, we gonna give me, you know, how can I turn this in to help pay my expenses? And anyway, this particular company, we worked out a deal and they were gonna quote unquote sponsored me.

But side note, nobody sponsors anybody. Yeah, in the doctor world, they're gonna get something out of it too. But you know, I got some things. We worked some things out, which just kind of introduced me into the pet food sales. I thought, that's pretty cool. This guy's getting paid to go. He's a bird dog, got to go to bird dog hunts and honey events and trade shows. And that's all he does. And I made a joke to him one time.

I said, I like to have your job. And I had a pretty good job, I thought, you know, or did at FedEx, and he said, be careful what you wish for. And then a few months later FedEx offered a buyout and I was thirty nine years old, married and had two kids, and that company offered me a full time job as a field sales rep. I said, man, this is perfect. I can go do well I always wanted and get paid. And so I took a leap of faith, and man, that was an education I learned

at that point on to get everything in writing. Don't agree to nothing that's in writing. Yeah, but uh, that was kind of my my introduction to pet food sales. And then I went to work for a whostsale distributor where you know, as manufacturers, we sell to hostel distributors who sell to retailers you know, and do online to consumers.

So I fell in love with it. I was ordered for a distributor out of out of Rhode Island actually, and I covered Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, and that's where I met Scott Glover and Antoine album It's the guys that owned US pet Food Next Level. At the time, they were the owners of Mid America Pet Food. Some of you folks may know that they were the original greadors and original owners of Mid America, which made Victor

dog Food. At the time, that's where I met those guys. Man, we just hit it off like brothers, you know, just just a perfect for perfect connection. They offered me a job, and I glad they took it, and no looking back, and be with those guys now since about twenty thirteen, and just super great people and know their families very well.

And I'll follow those guys anywhere. But that you sold, you know, they had had been America Victor dog Food had that company sold it in twenty twenty had a two year non compete and they couldn't hire any of

us directly because they're non compete. So I had to go somewhere else for a while and then come back with them in the fall of twenty twenty one, and they were just starting to break ground on what's now called US pet Food, our plant there on Highway two seventy one south of Mount Pleasant, And we have two brands. Next Level is one of our brands are our super premium brand. Then another one called Stratus, which is more of an economy brand, feeds very well but just a

little bit easier on the pocketbook. But that's our two brands. And during our non compete there for a little bit, I was able to sell supplements, So I traveled east coast from Florida selling supplements, and then we launched Next Level in September of twenty twenty three. It just took off like a rocket ship. And you know we mentioned earlier, sales is all about relationships, and there's lots of different dog free brands that there are people to choose from.

You know, there's only thirty five forty manufacturers in the United States, but yet there's five thousand different brands. And some of the brands that we know, some people know, they't even they don't even own their own manufacturing plant. They're paying somebody else to make it for them. That's one of the things that gives us a little different little leg ups. We own our own plant, we built it.

aping and excavating and whatnot. And Scott come back and he wanted to build a female his parents were retiring. He wanted to build a dog food plant and just a little four state multi regional dog food plant. He called Dan Twine up still had his phone number. Antoine moved to Northeast, Texas and they built men America pet food from the ground up and jumped in a car, went around and didn't come home till they sold the

first truck of dog food. And they got it done, and that was in two thousand and eight, two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, and minute just word of mouth. The product fed so well, just took off its word of mouth. And those guys took a lot of their knowledge they have from the dairy industry and applied it to dog food. We feel like they kind of set the bar down gut health and pet food.

A lot of people talk about having prebodics probotics in their food, but it's just a tag what do you call a tag dress, just a little pixie dust so you can have it on the tags that looks good. Well, these guys really used the stuff on it, and you can tell the big difference in the digestion and how the dog performed and gut health. So that kind of

changed the pet food world. People have to start following suit, you know, because you don't want to feed the dog food and then go back out to the kennel or in your house whatever and have a big, big mess, you know, or land mines out in your yard so they're not digesting you that. It took what we learned from that venture and even improved on even more to take it to quote unquote the next level. Yeah, and some of the things that we've learned, you know, house

they're getting to be too much calcium. Some people think you got to have calcium.

your diet. And if you can't, if you can't absorb that, if it's getting blocked by too much calcium, you're not getting no benefit of it. So you'll notice that in your skin and coat. You know, I spend a lot of time in studying and the hired doctor George Collins on nutritionness out of Saint Louis. Been in the industry for years and worked for all the big major companies and just focus on keeping the protein levels high higher

and then the calium levels low. And there's ways to do that with with you know, using the whole hidr lifed chicken, a little devil of blood and meal and so on and so forth, and buying a quality premium product that we use. People some manufacturers are buying a cheaper meat meal and they're getting more bones and ash, and that's why the costminers are so high. But the government says no more than two point five percent and in a back of dog food. So yeah, big, big difference.

And you know, these guys just spend a lot of time and a lot of money h studying it and they do have a passion for it. But they take took their knowledge from the real feed meal time and put it in. It's not just an investment for them. They're not just throwing money in it and spending a wheel hope that lands on jackpot. That's not what they're with. Their purpose is and they really do make believe in and have a passion for animal health. Yeah, and we

believe we're the best nutritional value on the market. Are we the cheapest though? Are we the most expensive? Lord?

I've been to a lot of pet food plants and most of them you have to leave your phone in your vehicle and sign an NBA before you can come inside it. Ours is wide open. Not wide open that they just came off the street and walk in it. But you know, if you've got business to tend with us, you know, basically wide open because they have to video on Facebook. But it's pretty pretty neat, you know. We get your We have a lab so when the trucks come in our facility, they weigh in and then they

go to a lab. Truck drivers get out and they go into a breaker in the bottom of the lab our. Lab techs come out probe the trucks take it inside and we've got a machine that's a wet chemistry machine and they can test for anything. We know exactly what cowsum levels are, we know the peroxide values, how old the product is, test for salmonilla, all that, all that stuff. We can test for it, and if it's good, it

moves into the receiving pit of us. No good to turn around, they leave and uh so our our suppliers who we buy our products from, no, we're going to do that. So they send us good product. They're not going to take the time and sending us a product that's not any good knowing we're going to reject it. Then they got to try to sell somebody else or get do something else with it. So we get we get premium product, and the grains come in, they go to the to the grain side, and negga n loaded

and the silos. Any of the meat meals that we use, like a beef meal, chicken meal, portmeal, fish meal goes inside and we can receive four trucks an hour. Well why does that matter? Because if you can only receive one truck an hour, that's all you can make. And so we can receive four trucks an hour. So somebody plays the truck truck loload order today. You know, day's Wednesday.

We can deliver it to my Monday, you know, so we can get it made pretty quick because of the way they design this facility, Yeah, built in scalability.

storage bins. And then when we're going to make a we're going to run a formula and augusts mixed together into batching and then all of that product goes in you know, their rices, the grains and the meat meals all go into a hammer meal if you know what a hammer meal if you don't think about a cylinder or a coffee can, so to speak, with a rod through it and a bunch of little hammers on the inside of its spinning real fast. So it just crushes

it all up into a powder. And we grind that so much where it goes through a three sixty fourth screen has to fall through the three sixty four so it's almost like a real fine powder. Yeah, And it goes from that into the extruder extruders that if you want to call it an oven or cooking process, it's where it gets extruded. So they take steam and pressure

into this extruder. So if you look at the carbohydrates under a microscope our kibble, it pops it like a like a piece of popcorn kernel, and then it streets out into a kibble. The knives cut it into a kibble and that goes up pneumatically over into the dryer, and so on and so forth. But the unique thing about that three sixty four screen is we're not so much worried about how many tons can we make per hour?

Right in a pet food manufacturing plant, the more tongs you can produce an hour, the more money you're gonna make. You know, tons per our tons p hour. We slow our down a little bit. We want quality more than quantity, so we slow our ours cooking process, so to speak, down, grind a little bit longer to get a finer it's just going to help with digestibility. If you take a handful of popcorn kernels just right of the bag or the jar and you swallow them, you're gonna see them again,

and you're gonna have a belly ache. We all know that about corn, right, you pop them in the popcorn, you never see that again. You digest it. Right. So with the carbohydrates, we pop all those really well, we're gonna get a good digest. We know they're gonna get a digest and the dog is gonna be a good a lot of use of the product. So it goes over in our in our facility kind of like a hall of separation, and it goes from the extruder over to the dryer through air. You show up shot over

in the in the pipeline. That's a break right there. If there's any contamination salmonella, that's gonna be on the raw side. So the people who work on the on the feed meal side, so to speak, the extruder and all the receiving pits there, they never intermingle with the people on the post cook side. They have different break rooms, different time clocks. They see each other. They come to work, and they see each other they leave. They don't intermingle

during the day. That's how you control food safety contamination one way. So it goes over into the dryer, comes in about twenty percent moreture. We drive down to about eight percent and then it goes into the fat coder cooler and over into the backing uh, and it gets bagged up into the warehouse. It's pretty simple, but slow and steady wins their race every time. Yeah, buying quality ingredients. If we buy quality ingredients, we can produce a quality kibble.

And I like the fact that there's there's two two owners, you know. Also the fact that they've worked together for so long, like kind of proves that they trust each other. And they must be some pretty good old boys. They're good and shared passions.

A lot of pet food companies use that. And if you look look at that up it's it's has to humans. It comes in a box with skull and crossbones on it. We use cellplex, a form of selenium yeast, and it comes from all Tech over in Lexington, Kentucky area. It come right up through the ground. It's it's organic, there's free right in the bloodstream, so they get full full use of that product. Is it costs a little bit more money, but the benefits out weigh the negatives, so

it's worth spending a little bit extra more money. We trademark the term Sciences in the bag and we believe that you know, you'll have some brands that advertised, oh, for skin and coat for gut health, Well, all of ours are for skinning coat and gut health, every one of them. Yeah, And we've got twelve formulas now and for more coming out by the end of the year, so we'll have sixteen formulas by the end of the year. And every one of the war formulas are about gut health.

And then we have some that are more a little bit specific for skinning coat, and we have some with lucosamin and androit and the hips and joints, and there's a lot of foods that advertise that they use lucosamin and android, but if you look at it, against's an tag dress three hundred milligrams. We're using eight hundred and fifty to nine hundred milligrams you know per kilogram in the back. So that's therapeutical levels for skin and coat or for the hips and joint. And why why would

does hown guys care about that? Well, to think about it, how many times have you took your dogs out and hunting and you go get them out of the dog box and you get home or the next morning you see them come calling down the dog out, stoved up and they're just stiff. Well, the coastman, you're great and will help help with that. Yeah, And so it helps to recovery a lot faster.

You can live off that, but it's not very nutritious for you. We can go out to night and go to the Chinese buffet or a Mexican Mexican place, and we can eat all the food we want. We can drink tequila and beer all night long and get up tomorrow and go build fence. But I promise you we're gonna hit our thumb. We're gonna we're gonna defence. It

is gonna be a little crooked. Something's gonna be off. But if we'll drink ice water, ice tea and eat, you know, a good clean meal steak, chicken, breast, pork chops or whatever, and get a good night's sleep, well we'll have less mistakes tomorrow. We work same way with these With these hounds, whether you're competition hunting or just pleasure hunting, you want them their minds sharp and feeling good, and they're gonna perform for a lot better. And in the big, the

big tonehound events. You know, the difference between going home and a brand new truck, or you know twenty thousand and thirty thousand dollars could be five seconds, and the difference between five seconds could be how you feel you know, a decision you make. So no, no dog food is gonna make your dog a world champion. Uh, but it could sure enough hell or hurt you.

We're doing a little dirty carnivore. But yeah, but I can tell you, like just with for one, the amount of waste that my body gives off is nothing compared to what it was before when I was eating eating a lot of wider things. It's clear that my body is designed to do something with that nutrition, that meat to where it's like I feel better, I wake up and I don't have a mental fog. There's there's a lot of times before with just like a normal diet that I would uh it would take me a while

to shake a fog out out of my brain. I wouldn't be as sharp. And then my energy levels are more sustained throughout the day and I can't help but think that it would be that way inside of inside of dog food too.

a month to five the same amount of dogs. And that's the savings right there. It may cost a little bit more per bag, but your overall cost per day feeding is going well. Well.

So if you're feeding your dog. When we used to have one in prior, like we had a forty two percent protein to hot, we didn't really know. But we know now that they're gonna most that's gonna be excreted through the year. You know, if you get over thirty percent, they really can't process that anyway. So think about your dog's at activity level and then they choose your protein and fat. You know, if if you're hunting a couple

of nights a week, you can probably get away. Just find a twenty four to twelve or twenty six eighteen. Twenty six eighteen is a really good all around you know, we're coming in the fall of the year, are getting colder. Dog's gonna eat more to help stay warmer. They're gonna

burn more calories. So if you feed a twenty four to twenty all high energies, not all, but most of all the high energies you ever see, there are twenty four twenty four percent protein, twenty percent fat, and then use it goes from there to a thirty twenty more

a little more protein if you need it. The bully guys and then we love the bully guys and they love our food, but they would feed a fifty percent protein diet if they could, just because they think they're gotta have it to get them dog really popped their muscles out of and again they can't process that much protein anyway.

four to twenty or thirty twenty in the wintertime. In the summer time, when they're not hunting much nothing, they'll feed more of a maintenance or a norse normally active, lower protein, lower fat dog food. But if you're hunting a year round hard, you know, you might feed at twenty six eighteen and then just feed a little bit more in the wintertime. You see so many things out there, there's so much marketing. I've sold a lot of dog food in my life, but I have never ever sold

a bag of dog food to a dog. I've always sold it to the dog's owner, To a person, A lot of emotion goes into buying dog food. You know, hey, that'll boy, give me a couple of hats. I better try his dog food. You know that doesn't make no sense to me. But know exactly what you're buying, and know what your dog need is. There's no need in feeding the high protein, high fat diet. If you don't need that, it's just a waste. And when it talks

about calories per cup, you know calories. We know that you need a higher You got a performance dog, I need to fight feed higher calories. Everybody should measure their cakews per cup the same way. You take this aight downce coffee cup right here, you scoop up your kibble, you weigh it out. There's a mathematical formulation you do to get your cake cows. If you take that same cup, then that kibble, then you grind it. Well, now you've got more room. Dad's more so it looks like it's

more dense, and it's not. Uh So. Some people will advertise real high cake cows and they may be fibbing a little. You know, I'm back early in the days. I've talked people, so how you can feed your X number of how many cups a day are you feeding? I just feed one or two cups of dog foo today? Ain't no way. Let me see your dog, let me see your cup. Well, then they ring you McDonald's thirty two ounce cup. I'm like, no, man, a cup eight ounces as a cup because I was the same way

early on. I didn't know. Yeah, I used the coffe again, I feed one can of day how much foods that can? And I didn't know? Or I use an automatic feeder A lot of us, a lot of us. How guys do that too, And there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to check on it. You know, how's the dog talk to you? Some people think they actually do talk to you that, but through their food consumption, through their input and their output and how they perform is

how they talk to you. Yeah, you need to so much water they're drink and how much food drinking and all that stuff?

to Chewy. We're on Chewy now Chewy dot com. Okay, cool, we're on there. Amazon, our website, you can we're up our website. But there's plenty places around and it's growing.

see the difference that makes you know our product. It's it's always cool to see those videos or those pictures you know, before and after. You know, people you can't buy one bag of dog food and see see a difference. You're going to see a difference on ours pretty quick. In the in the stewl volume, if you if you buy a bag of Next Level of dog food, put it on that dog and that dog only or that

only feed. Next Level no trees on nothing for thirty days, you will see a difference, but usually it takes a couple of months or let's see a big, big, big difference. But some folks, you know, they they want to see overnight success. And you can on some things, uh and digestion, on urs, you can. Most dog foods you got to take. You need to take seven to ten days to do a transition ours. You know, you could probably go ahead and switch, yeah and not have no problem.