An Interview with Award Winning Ma Snax Chef Mary Ellen Oertel

Did you ever find yourself picking up a bag of dog treats and wondering, "what’s really in this stuff?” Luckily with organic products becoming more popular and widely available, we can make better choices for our beloved four-legged family members.

Former Chef Mary Ellen Oertel of Ma Snax is keeping it real, literally. After wandering dog food aisles for her adopted pit-bull, Penny, she decided to take a different route and make Penny’s food from scratch. Dog treats hand-made with the same fresh local organic ingredients her and her husband use in their meals. This novel idea eventually turned into a business plan and the rest is history.

What prompted you to start this business?
It all came together for me in January of ’04 of when I had decided I was completely burned out at the restaurant and we had just adopted Penny a few months prior. She was born at our local shelter, Pets Lifeline. We weren’t happy with most of what was on the market as far as food and treats go, and we wanted to feed her the best - so I started her on a home diet and baked her biscuits using the same organic ingredients we used as part of our diet. We’ve always thought of our pets as family members and we wouldn’t feed them anything we couldn’t eat ourselves.  We gave the cookies to our friends and family and everyone loved them.

I took some time off, and then started a private chef service as I tinkered with the dog snack recipes. Since then, it’s grown into a full-time business. We’ve had our share of growing pains, and as we grow, we encounter new challenges, but overall it’s been enjoyable and gratifying. I love being in this business.


What is your business motto?
“In Snax We Trust”? Just kidding…I don’t know if we have an official motto! We do use a tagline sometimes: “treat your dog to Ma Snax today and everyday”

We hope people consider our products as their ‘regular’ biscuit. Organic, fresh, human-quality dog food and treats should be the norm. We think in terms of quality, not quantity, so the big-box stores may have a giant case of dog bones, but they’re loaded with so much filler and weird stuff! It’s not a good value.

How does your extensive experience as a chef help you create recipes for Ma Snax?
Finding inspiration is easy; it’s all around me. Knowledge of food chemistry and combining flavors and ingredients has definitely helped in recipe formulation. Creating new dog treat recipes is like second nature really. I worked in food service for so long, its just part of me.



What is your best selling product?
Hard to say, we’ve got quite a few products ranging from our biscuits (which includes twelve plus flavors), bake-at-home biscuit and cake mixes, iced cookies, trainers, and our seasonal (Halloween and Christmas themed) gingerbread doghouses.

We also use seasonal ingredients so that we can cook with fresh flavors.  We have our seasonal treats such as our Sweet Potato & Ginger Snaps and Double Pumpkin Happiness biscuits - which sell well throughout the year but they skyrocket in sales during Autumn. We love seeing that.

We like doing custom work, variety is good and we like to make our customers happy by giving them what they want.



Is Penny a product tester?
YES. She’s our spokes model and official treat-taster.

Penny believes all of the cookies are hers, but she allows us to share some of the treats with other dogs; she’s a very generous girl. She’s not a beggar, but she will stand quite close while we’re packaging cookies, so we ask for a trick or to perform her most recent feat of “woo-wooing’ on command. She’s very vocal; she speaks to us all the time.

What’s her favorite treat?
She really loves them all, but if I had to pick only one I’d say the Peanut Butter & Honey. What is it about dogs and peanut butter? It’s like a marriage made in heaven.

She’s also obsessed with gingerbread; good thing it’s seasonal.

How have you/do you plan to expand your business throughout the Bay Area?
We’re always happy to send samples; we love it when the product sells itself. For me it’s fun to cross-market to atypical retailers. We think any savvy retailer ought to devote some amount of shelf space to quality pet products. We’re most recently working with an olive oil producer/retailer. We’re developing products for them using their olive oil.

Believe it or not, Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets are really valuable resources for that. I can’t tell you how many new businesses, rescues, bloggers, publications and general dog & animal loving folks we’ve discovered and connected with.

How are you involved in your local community?
We try and do as many local events as we can; whether it’s a vendor’s booth or just donating to an event.

We do little things like leave bunches of samples at our local post office, bank, UPS drop-off, etc so that people out with their dogs can have some snax.

What differentiates Ma Snax from the competition?
We don’t spend much time or effort comparing ourselves to others. We just try and do the best we can, and produce a product of the highest quality. We know we use the finest ingredients available and offer excellent selection and variety. If our brand speaks to a consumer, it’s great!

We’re agile enough to interact on a personal level with our customers. We have people contacting us quite often; they may ask for special flavors or combinations and if we’re able, we do it. We’re a family run business, not a nameless/faceless corporate operation.

What is next for Ma Snax?
Continue to grow our brand and we’d like to exhibit at a trade show this year. We’re thinking Superzoo in Las Vegas.

We’re also looking to move into a larger place. We really need more space. Ideally, we would convert an outbuilding into a bakeshop. We bake at a wonderful facility here in Sonoma, “Wild Thyme Catering” - which, by the way, will start renting out its beautiful courtyard space for dog parties and events starting May 15th.  But my dream is to have a large chunk of land with a remodeled barn that would house our bakeshop and production facility.

Anything else you’d like to share?
We’d just like to say thank you for the opportunity. We’re happy and fortunate to live & do business in this lovely chunk of the world [Napa].

We promise to keep making the best products we can, we hope you and your dogs love them!

For more information: www.masnax.com

All Photos By: Karli McAllister