Meet the Maker: Elisa Garcia-Rey, Dog Treat Maker

“Every day is different and you never know what to expect,” says Elisa Garcia-Rey, owner of Vermont Dog Eats, a Montpelier-based maker of real-food treats for dogs. “It definitely teaches you how to be resilient and adaptable and kind of ready for anything. It's like, if you plan on something going wrong, it won't. But something and another three things will.”

She founded her company 12 years ago, Elisa says, when she was “looking at the ingredient labels for my own dog's food and treats, and was just horrified by the list of unpronounceable names and chemicals and things that were being used in pet food and treats. And so I started making them myself just at home, in a regular kitchen with ingredients that I would use to make food for myself.”

She began by selling the treats at the farmer’s market in Burlington, where she lived at the time, often baking for hours in her home kitchen and “selling out in two hours.” It was at that weekly market that she met the buyer from Pet Food Warehouse, who helped her grow and gain broader distribution and sales. Over almost a decade, she worked into having the treats on sale in about 75 stores, mostly around New England. Meanwhile, she continued to work part-time as a marketing consultant. In 2022, Elisa received a grant from the Montpelier Development Corporation, which funded businesses to start or relocate their businesses in Montpelier. She had not planned on opening a retail storefront, she said, but the commercial kitchen space she found downtown had that option, so she decided why not.

It is a very bright, inviting space. “That was part of my thought process when we built this place out,” she says. “Because all the treat varieties that I have are different colors of the rainbow, I was like, I want to make this place very bright and colorful. It was fun building the space. And it was quite the labor of love. It was every weekend for ten months.”

The store and neighboring production space opened on May 27, 2023. Just 44 days later, on July 10, Montpelier was inundated by a horrific rain-induced flood that wiped out almost every downtown business. Elisa’s storefront had to be completely gutted and rebuilt. Yet, remarkably, Vermont Dog Eats was open again by late September 2023, making it one of the first businesses to get its doors back open. A testament to resilience and adaptability…

The treats Elisa offers are, as one of her customers called them, “crackers for dogs.” They are not uniform, nor are they cutely shaped like bones, say (though she does offer Vermont state-shaped treats). “I try to make them square, obviously,” she says, “but they're not like a specific kind of model.”

And when it comes to crafting new flavors (there are currently six), she consults with her longtime, VIP (“Very Important Puppies”) clients who have signed up as product testers. Recently, the group gave her an interesting lesson, she said, to “remember that you're selling to the owners and not the dogs... I was testing between beef and cheddar or black bean and cheddar. And surprisingly more dogs went for the black bean… But it didn't sell well because I think owners were like, ‘Black beans? I'm not getting my dog black beans…’ It just didn't sell well, I think because people don't associate black beans with dog treats.”

Elisa notes that, in the massive U.S. market for pet goods and treats, she has sometimes felt “like a minnow in the Pacific Ocean.” But she is happy with the sustainable niche and market she has built, and does not want the sort of disconnect from her clients that getting bigger and going with a major distributor would entail. And she is particularly in love with Vermont’s maker universe.

“I always say to people, ‘I never would have started this business in Boston when I lived there.’ It just didn't feel like that kind of an environment,” she says. “Whereas here it's always been super supportive, and everybody helps each other out. And you meet people and they're like, ‘Oh, I know this person who could help you with that,’ or ‘I know this person doing this cool thing and you should get together with them.’”

And that’s what she likes most about being a maker: “connecting with other makers and farmers and suppliers, like the people that I've gotten to meet through this that have their own small businesses. And, you know, who own a farm or who, like a friend of mine, is a fisherman in Burlington. He goes up to Alaska every summer. And that's who I get my salmon from for the salmon treats… You're surrounded by so many people who are like-minded and who value making quality things and putting something out there that's of worth and that, ultimately, improves people's lives in some way.”

And, despite the craziness of running a small business, she says, “it's pretty fun. I can't complain. I get to meet a lot of dogs. That makes the job pretty fun.”