PetPlate on Scaling Smarter

PetPlate is a direct-to-consumer human grade pet food company that delivers ready-to-eat, nutritious pet food designed by veterinarians and made by chefs. In May 2018, it closed a $4 million seed round led by Dane Creek Capital to scale operations and meet demand. CEO Renaldo Webb joined us at our Fail Friday this past June to share his stories of failure and lessons learned.

Renaldo founded PetPlate because he wanted to be able to feed his real food. After making hundreds of batches of home-cooked food for his dog Winston and his pup pals, Renaldo launched PetPlate as a nationwide subscription service in early 2017, following an appearance on the hit TV show Shark Tank.

Renaldo’s Fail Friday story begins as he’s scaling the company after raising pre-seed funding through Shark Tank. He and his investors decided it was time to expand the company’s manufacturing from a local commercial kitchen to working with a co-packer.

He honed in on three major failures and lessons learned:

1. Not having the right specs for PetPlate’s co-packer was a huge challenge. Ultimately this really comes down to learning what works at a small scale and what the startup’s customers loved, so as not marry them with a process that can’t deliver the experience its customers want.
2. PetPlate tried doing too much at once in the process of scaling bench-top formulations to something it could commercialize.
3. PetPlate moved too fast, especially when it came to finding its co-packer. He learned it’s important to take time to find the right co-packer and to cultivate a good relationship with them. Ultimately, PetPlate was able to find the right co-packer that met its needs and allow them to focus on what was important to the company’s mission: the quality of ingredients.

You can see videos of other presenters at our Fail Friday here.