our story

A few years ago, we* adopted a beautiful dog named Lluvia (pronounced “yoo-vee-uhh”). She had a terrible reaction to every kibble we tried– bad shedding, red rashes and constant digestive issues. We started cooking for her, and it totally turned her health around.

Lluvia was so grateful that in 2020, we decided to bring the joy and health benefits of eating cooked, human-grade food to other dogs. Lluvia signed on as a volunteer taste-tester.

With her input and a guidance from vet nutritionists, we perfected our recipes. You can now find California Dog Kitchen in the frozen sections of over 80 independent pet stores on the West Coast.

We* — we’re a pair of brothers who grew up in California.

Dogs deserve fresh food.

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Dogs deserve fresh food. 〰️

CERTIFICATIONS

We make the only USDA Certified Organic frozen food for dogs that’s available at independent pet retailers.

USDA certified organic is the strictest food quality standard in the world. Being USDA certified organic means that inspectors visit our facility regularly to ensure that we follow a strict set of organic food production rules. These rules include not using harmful chemicals in our kitchen, being able to prove that we put only organic ingredients into our organic products, being able to demonstrate that our packaging is not treated with fungicides, and much more. For our certified organic line of foods, all agricultural ingredients are certified organic, meaning they were themselves produced on a farm that follows USDA Organic program rules.

Just 2 pet food companies have been accepted into the Good Food Guild, and we’re one of them!

The Good Food Guild exists to unify producers of foods that are "Made with a balanced objective of local, organic and highest-quality ingredients." Food crafters in the guild make some of the highest quality, locally sourced food products in the USA. During the application process, GFG checks that applicants are transparent about sourcing, source high quality ingredients, source locally, don’t use any GMO ingredients, and more.

We were accepted into GFG in early 2023, and are excited to join this vibrant community of craft food producers!

Our food comes in compostable paper packagings, lined with compostable vegetable-based plastics. You can compost the bamboo paper tubs and kraft paper bags through industrial city “green bin” programs.

Virtually all dog food products are packaged in single-use, petroleum-based plastics. Some frozen food packagings are recyclable through programs like TerraCycle, but these programs are difficult to use and we’re skeptical that they do much environmental good. We’re trying to help the dog food industry improve on these standards.

1% of all of our sales goes to environment-related nonprofits. We usually choose animal-related nonprofits to make these donations to.

Here’s a partial list of nonprofits that we’ve worked with recently:

  • Buddy Dog Humane Society

  • Humane Society of Sonoma County

  • Jameson Humane (norcal)

  • International Animal Rescue

  • Mission Paw’sible

  • Alliance for Organic Integrity

Do you represent a 1% for the Planet-approved charity? If our missions are aligned, we’d love to earmark some of our 1% funds for your organization. Get in touch!

our kitchen motto
is “Dogs first.”

We cook everything in our own commercial kitchen, in San Diego. Our kitchen is certified by the USDA Organic program, which means that we use quality-inspected water, the safest cleaning chemicals, and non-chemical pest control methods.

A PhD vet nutritionist with over 40 years of experience formulates our food, and the formulations are double-checked by a certified vet nutritionist as a backup step. We lab test our food regularly to verify that the formulations meet the AAFCO and NRC dog food standards.

The team

  • Ilya Altshteyn

    Co-founder

    In charge of sales, marketing and business development.

  • Sasha Altshteyn

    Co-founder

    In charge of production and developing new products.

  • Rayleen villa

    General manager

    Running our kitchen and sourcing ingredients.

  • Lluvia & Shamu

    Taste testers

    Bravely volunteering to eat everything.

  • "no tummy issues at all! I’m noticing that his little nose is wet and shiny and cold. He hasn’t been like that since he was a puppy."

    — Kellie G.

  • "Thank you for making superb dog food! You are exactly what I've been looking for (especially the venison version!!! and using USA meats)."

    — Amy M.

  • "I wanted to make sure to write you to let you know what a difference your product has made!"

    — Jim F.

2 TYPES of sustainable packaging.

Our food comes in:

(1) Bamboo paper tubs

(2) Four-pound bags of individually frozen cubes. Each cube is about 4oz, and feeds 10 lbs of dog for 1 day. For example: a 40lb dog needs 4 cubes per day.