How Lucy Postins Founded the 1st Human-Grade Pet Food Brand, The Honest Kitchen
These days, it's not uncommon to see human-grade pet food brands at your local pet shop, but it all started with Lucy Postins and The Honest Kitchen more than 20 years ago.
Lucy was an equine and canine nutritionist before creating the brand, inspired by treating her own dog's health issues starting with high-quality whole foods. In addition to being the founder, she now serves as The Honest Kitchen's chief integrity officer, ensuring the brand sticks to its commitment of serving the best "people food" for pets, prepared in human food facilities and featuring none of the fillers, meat meals and GMO ingredients commonly found in other pet foods.Basically, The Honest Kitchen started a whole movement, and we got the chance to chat with Lucy herself to learn more about her story and why The Honest Kitchen's mission is so important to her.
Name: Lucy Postins
Instagram handle: @lucypostins
Hometown: Rancho Santa Fe, California
1. Lucy has loved animals all her life.
"I've always been an animal lover and I grew up in rural England with a pet dog and cat, and began riding horses at the age of 5. Prior to starting The Honest Kitchen, I worked as an equine and canine nutritionist."
-Lucy Postins
(Photo credit: The Honest Kitchen)
2. The Honest Kitchen was born out of a simple desire to create better food for dogs.
"The Honest Kitchen first began in my own kitchen in San Diego in 2002. My Rhodesian Ridgeback, Mosi, was experiencing chronic ear infections and when veterinary treatments failed to help him, I realized that improving his diet was the answer in truly getting him healthy from the inside out. There were no high-quality, whole-food solutions on the market, so I decided to make his food myself using human-grade fresh and raw ingredients. The homemade whole food diet made a huge positive impact but it was incredibly time-consuming and messy to prepare, so I landed on dehydration as a way to simplify mealtimes and reduce the state of disarray in my kitchen! Seeing the positive impacts of healthy, human-grade whole food on Mosi's health made me realize other pets could benefit too—and that's when I decided to turn it into a business!"
-Lucy Postins
3. The name "The Honest Kitchen" is about just that—honesty.
"The Honest Kitchen is all about bringing the highest quality standards of 'people food' to pets—it's what we call 'The Honest Difference.' Honest is our middle name, and is a reference to some of the shady things that happen in the more traditional, feed-grade pet food industry. It's also a commitment to constantly operating with transparency and openness that's deserving of our customers' trust. Kitchen is a nod to our authentic, human grade practices and distancing ourselves from the practices that are often followed in conventional pet food ingredient sourcing and production. As the first human grade pet food brand, we've dedicated ourselves to raising the bar on quality, safety and integrity across the pet food industry and helping pet parents understand the links between good health and good, honest food."
-Lucy Postins
4. The brand's mission is all about putting pets on the path to good health through food.
"In literal terms, this means creating products that make a real, tangible, positive difference to pet health and well-being. Good food also goes beyond the bowl to make a positive impact in the world around us, through our ingredient standards, the ways our farmers respect the earth, ensuring fair pay for our own team and throughout the supply chain and the ways we give back in the community through charitable giving and volunteering.
As the first human-grade pet food brand, we've remained committed to delivering balanced nutrition and great taste in each product, all crafted from the same ingredients you'd serve at your own table, and made with all the attention and care that goes into homemade meals. We also ditch the heavy processing of conventional pet food brands and opt for gentler approaches such as cold pressing, roasting and dehydrating. This ensures our food is minimally processed to retain key nutrients and delivers the aroma and taste of whole foods, so even the pickiest of eaters will gobble up their dinner!"-Lucy Postins
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5. When it comes to both life and business, Lucy has generally preferred to be self-reliant.
"I've always been a bit of a lone wolf, especially when it comes to my entrepreneurial journey, and have never really relied super heavily on outside advisors. With that said, one good friend and long-time mentor, Shawn Parr, who owned a local branding agency called Bulldog Drummond, encouraged me in the early days to make myself a more visible and outspoken leader. This advice really helped set the tone of authenticity, transparency and accountability to shine through in the way The Honest Kitchen has operated and stayed true to its roots even as we've grown. I'm incredibly passionate about what we stand for, what we do and how we do it. I think nowadays more than ever before, there's a demand for accountability from brands, and making myself more visible, even when I wasn't necessarily comfortable with the spotlight early on, helped build the trust of our most passionate consumers."
-Lucy Postins
6. She says that over the years, the one thing that's ensured the success of The Honest Kitchen has been passion.
"Starting with my own passion and dedication in overcoming early hurdles when I was first getting the company off the ground and permeating throughout everything we do to an incredible dedicated and passionate team today. I think everyone at THK absolutely loves pets; we're foodies, and food is our love language!"
-Lucy Postins
(Photo credit: The Honest Kitchen)
7. Focusing on one task at a time has also helped her get to where she is today.
"On a more practical level, I think it's very easy for founders to get overwhelmed, distracted and try to multitask in a way that becomes counter-productive. Your mind is literally buzzing with ideas and a never-ending to-do list of tasks and challenges, opportunities and problems to be solved. So, one habit that I do try to focus on is this idea of what I call uni-tasking, rather than multi-tasking—giving full focus and singular attention to the job at hand, or at least trying to!"
-Lucy Postins
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8. One of the most rewarding things about her work has been the opportunity to focus on the aspects that matter to her most.
"I'm incredibly lucky, because a few years ago when I wanted to be able to adjust my work-life balance and focus more on my daughters, I was able to hand over the CEO reins and dedicate myself to the parts of our business that I'm really most passionate about. In my role as founder and chief integrity officer, I get to be the spokesperson and storyteller for our brand, as well as ensure we always follow our true north, stay true to our roots and stick to our ethics as we continue to grow and evolve. It's unbelievably rewarding to be able to have a brand that's now 22 years old, that still acts with a scrappy, entrepreneurial mindset, that's still disruptive within the industry, treats our team and our external partners with kindness and that's dogged in the way we chase down our goals!"
-Lucy Postins
(Photo credit: The Honest Kitchen)
9. Lucy's work beyond The Honest Kitchen focuses on enhancing people's lives.
"Outside of The Honest Kitchen, I'm a reiki practitioner and I volunteer my time with hospice patients. It's very meaningful to spend time with people and provide comfort the end stage of their lives and I find it provides a really good reminder about the fragility of life and a reminder to live in a meaningful, fulfilling way that you can ultimately feel proud of, even on your last day in this body."
-Lucy Postins
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