Petfood entrepreneur's global business goes local

Business school dropout Jerel Kwek, 36, didn’t stick around the Philadelphia-based Wharton campus long enough to get a degree.

Instead, at 23, still in his first year and a long way from home in Singapore, he launched a dehydrated pet-food business in a market dominated by global giants such as Nestlé and Mars.

“I’ve always been passionate about pets and food,” he says. “I felt there was so much junk pet food out there, made of unidentified ingredients, using a lot of artificial colourings and preservatives, that there was a great opportunity to create a new category.

“That’s also why we came to New Zealand because if you want to produce the best food in the world where else would you do it?”

New Zealand ticked all the boxes of being free of diseases such as mad cow and foot and mouth. It also does not use hormones or steroids, and has a wide range of protein and other sources for products that are grain (gluten)-free, need no additives or fillers and can be eaten by cats and dogs with skin and gastro-intestinal conditions or other allergies to highly processed food.

A plant at Te Puke was built in 2006 and has just been expanded to lift production by more than 30 times. It is this extra output that has enabled Addiction for the first time to sell its product range on the local market.

A local distributor, Ultrapet, has been appointed, with most of the outlets being veterinary clinics and pet stores.

Odd as it may seem, Mr Kwek says locally made Addiction products will compete in the local market against mainly imports from Australia and the US. 
The Te Puke plant now produces 70% of the company’s pet food products for export. The rest is made at facilities in the US, Canada and Australia.

“We are now the largest dried pet food plant in New Zealand,” he says.

A selling point is that a large source of the protein is possum meat, which is used along with other game meat instead of chicken, beef and lamb
As for the product range, it includes flavours that sound like the menu in a gourmet café – Venison & Eel, Brushtail (possum) & Vegetables, Venison & Apples and Unagi (eel) & Seaweed.

New Zealand Manuka honey is among the many herbs, botanicals and berries that are added for sale in Asian pet-owning countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and of course, Singapore as well as North America.

Addiction Foods has its US headquarters in Seattle and an Asian headquarters in Singapore. It employs 45 staff. Addiction brands are stocked in more than 2000 stores worldwide with exports to Europe starting a year ago.

Products also include the Wishbone range for supermarkets and the Nutri-RX range of prescriptive diets and supplements.