Good Company: Fur Monster Goodies

Salka makes things that go on your dog. Generously, that is about five minutes of their day.

Good Company is where we write about the rest of it. One small brand an edition, doing something we don’t, to a standard we recognise. The rule we set ourselves is that we only feature a brand whose ingredient list we would be happy to see printed next to ours.

This one has a shorter list than we do.

Edition two: Fur Monster Goodies

Fur Monster Goodies makes superfood treats for dogs and cats, handmade in small batches in Ventura, California. Organic cookies, jerky-style bark, freeze-dried organs. Their line is “Handcrafting the very best treats for your fur monster”, and the two words they put on the front of the brand are No Silly Stuff.

The founder is the reason we called

Fur Monster was started by Jessica, who came out of professional kitchens. In her own words she “built my career around high-quality ingredients and thoughtful food.” She stepped away from restaurant work during COVID, brought home a dog named Zuma in 2021, and went looking for treats made the way she was used to making food.

What she says happened next is the whole company in one line: “I started looking for treats made with premium, organic ingredients — nothing really hit the mark. So I stopped looking, and started making.”

We have said in this series that a lot of pet brands are founded by people who love dogs and learn the category afterwards, ours included. This is the other kind. Jessica did not learn to read an ingredient list because she started a pet company; she started a pet company because she already read them for a living. Zuma is listed on the site as Chief Taste Tester, which is the correct amount of seriousness for a company like this.

The label test

We read other people’s labels the way we ask you to read ours. Here is what stood out.

Five ingredients. The carrot cookie is organic peanut butter, organic carrot, organic oat flour, organic chickpea flour, organic ground turmeric. That is the entire list. The green apple one runs to six — apple, chickpea flour, oat flour, coconut oil, spearmint, spirulina. For scale, our shortest formula is the paw cleanser at twelve, and our balm is seven, and we talk about both of those constantly. A five-line label is a hard thing to achieve and an easy thing to check.

They name their suppliers, not their adjectives. The turmeric is from the American Turmeric Company and grown domestically. The bison is from North Star Bison, grass-fed and pasture-raised. “Premium” and “thoughtfully sourced” are phrases anyone can print. A supplier name is a thing you can go and look up, which is the same reason we name Du Quoin, Illinois in the last edition and put our own full formulas on the site.

The ingredient names are food. Carrot. Beet. Hemp heart. Cranberry. Spearmint. You do not need a glossary, and there is nothing on the list doing a job you cannot guess. We would rather a label read like a kitchen than a lab, and when it has to read like a lab there should be a reason.

They print what the product is not. Every treat page carries the line “intended for intermittent or supplemental feeding only.” That is a required feeding statement, and plenty of brands bury it. Putting it on the product page, in the description, is a brand telling you the limits of its own product before you ask. We notice that, because it is the same instinct behind the sentence we put on every dental product: this is a thirty-second routine, not a treatment.

Where it fits, honestly

A treat is a treat. These are rich — the carrot cookie runs 31% crude fat as a minimum, which is what happens when the second thing on the list is real peanut butter, and it is the point of the cookie rather than a flaw in it. But it means the answer to “how many” is fewer than you think, especially for a small dog.

Anything that goes in the bowl is a conversation with your vet and not with a grooming company. If your dog is on a restricted or prescription diet, is managing their weight, or has a known sensitivity to peanuts, legumes or poultry, ask first. Fur Monster tells you themselves that this is supplemental feeding. We are just repeating it because we think they are right.

What we like about it is narrower and more useful than a health claim: it is five organic ingredients from named suppliers, baked by a chef in Ventura, and you can read the whole label in about four seconds.

One more thing we noticed

The treat jars are hand-blown in Mexico. The bowls and slow feeders are made by potters in Ojai, twenty minutes up the road.

A small brand that spends its money with other small makers, and sells through independents who actually hand-sell it, is telling you what it wants to be when it grows. We have made the same set of choices, and they are more expensive than the alternatives every single time.

Why we are doing this at all

Our whole argument is that what goes on your dog accumulates — a small dose of synthetic fragrance every bath, every paw wipe, every freshening spray. That argument does not stop at the skin, and it is at its strongest with treats, because treats are the one thing most dogs get several times a day, every day, for their whole life.

We are not the people to make that argument about food. So we keep finding the people who are. If you run a small brand doing this properly and you would like to be in a future edition, email us with Good Company in the subject line.

This article is general information, not veterinary or nutritional advice. Diet and treat decisions belong with your veterinarian. We are describing another company’s products as we understand them from their own published materials; for current formulas, guaranteed analysis and feeding guidance, go to the source.