Safegaurding Your Pets Against Air Pollution Vol XII , Issue No 12 , Dec 2019 | страница 38

Industry Speak
WAGGY ZONE
DROOLICIOUS FROZEN
YOGHURTS FOR DOGGIES
Ms. Darshan Kaur Khalsa, Founder of Waggy Zone Dog Ice Creams in conversation with Ms.
Priyanka Tanwar, Editor of Creature Companion Magazine on her education, entrepreneurial
journey, product offerings, innovations, research and expansion plans. Excerpts . . .
What was the key motivation
behind starting Waggy Zone?
It was my furball, Tyra - a German
Shepherd. I was absolutely scared
of dogs and then LOVE happened.
My fi ance had adopted Tyra when
she was 45 days old; and Tyra and I
fell in love with each other. As she
is my fi rst dog, I got very excited
and I would attend all the pet events
happening in the city. At the events,
I realised that dogs would get only
chicken rice and vanilla ice cream. I
thought it was unfair to the dogs to
get only vanilla ice cream, as I come
from a family with an ice cream
manufacturing business. Slowly,
I realised that dogs cannot have
milk and sugar and so my journey
of developing Waggy Zone for my
furball and then for the whole pet
community began.
How far did your experience of
growing up in a family with an ice
cream manufacturing business help
in shaping up your entrepreneurial
venture?
Well!
There
wasn’t
anything
in the frozen dessert segment
in the pet industry. So, coming
from a background of ice cream
manufacturers was a blessing. Ice
cream is a temperature sensitive
item and needs a lot of care while
38
handling. I had to not only work
around logistics for the frozen
yogurts but also explain and educate
about frozen products to every pet
store that wanted to sell our offerings.
We also had to explain about our
products to a lot of pet parents, as it
was a relatively new concept in the
pet industry. Even after studying
about dogs and canine nutrition, it
was a challenge to fi t what’s good for
dogs with the traditional defi nition of
ice creams or frozen treats.
Tell us about the different fl avours
of doggy ice creams that Waggy
Zone offers. How did you go about
shortlisting these fl avours?
We have fi ve fl avours available in
frozen yogurts. These are - Honey,
Banana, Blueberry, Mango and
Carrot. We had initially made a list of
fruits that dogs could eat and made
yogurt samples with each of them.
After doing a trial and error of all the
fl avours for six months, we observed
that these fi ve fl avours were most
liked by doggos, so we selected these
fi ve droolicious fl avours for our fi nal
product.
What kind of research did you carry
out before coming up with your
present ice cream formula?
I sat down with a few vets to study
Creature Companion | December 2019 • Vol. XII • Issue 12 • Noida
about dogs and the food products
that they are not allowed. Generally,
a human ice cream is primarily
made up of milk and sugar, and both
these items are harmful to dogs.
Thus, we make our frozen treats
with yogurt, which is probiotically
healthy for dogs; and honey, which
is again healthy for canines. And we
have formulated it like an ice cream
so that dogs can enjoy healthy ice
creams which pet parents can feed
guilt-free.
Waggy Zone recently opened a store
at Mira Road in Mumbai. Tell us
more about this. Which other brands
does your store retail?
Waggy Zone has opened a distribution
centre at Mira road, Mumbai. This
store supplies only Waggy Zone
frozen yogurts for dogs.
Which pet stores and e-portals
retail Waggy Zone Dog Ice Creams
in India?
With our frozen yogurts, we are
active majorly in Bombay and Delhi.
However, with our new product -
Waggy Zone Doggy Insta Mix, we can
now ship across India via Amazon.