Delivery Services Bring the Food to the Pet

Spence, a Siberian husky who lives in Camarillo, eats a lot. Just ask his owners, Michelle and Bret Atiyeh, who lug around his 40-pound bags of dry dog food.

After struggling with one of those bags one day last year, it occurred to the Atiyehs that there must be other pet owners who also were forced to carry hefty helpings of food for their animals--ones who, like themselves, would rather not be doing so.

So the entrepreneurs started Dog Food Express!, a pet food delivery service offering premium brands of pet food. Dog Food Express!, which will mark its first anniversary April 11, is one of several pet food delivery operations in Ventura County.

“Basically, our premise was that if you want good dog food that you can’t find in a grocery store, you have to make a separate trip to the pet store, and to get a good deal you have to buy the bigger bag,” Bret Atiyeh said. “People don’t want to make that extra trip, or if they do, they don’t want to carry that 40-pound bag.”

Dog Food Express! sells Nutro, Nature’s Recipe, Iams, Science Diet and other leading specialty brands of dry and canned dog and cat food to customers from Newbury Park to Ventura. The business also carries birdseed, rabbit pellets, bunny food, rat and mouse mix, guinea pig mix and cockatiel, macaw and parrot food.

“We negotiated with different suppliers in Los Angeles, and they were able to give us pricing that was pretty good, like a major store would get,” Atiyeh said. “The distributors just pull their 18-wheelers right up outside our house.”

Atiyeh said he has 113 regular clients and is hoping to reach 1,000 by the end of the second year of business. He and his wife are trying to trademark the Dog Food Express! name and ultimately want to expand the business nationally, he said.

For Bret Atiyeh, starting a pet food delivery service was not a major stretch. He’s been involved in the people food delivery service, with the Domino’s Pizza chain, since 1983. Atiyeh operates a Domino’s franchise in Camarillo and used to run a second franchise in Camarillo and another in Goleta.

“My wife usually takes the pet food orders. I get up in the morning and make all the deliveries,” he said. “After I deliver dog food, I work all day making pizza.”

In his early days in the pizza business, managing a new franchise in Lompoc, Atiyeh said the delivery concept was so new to the area that customers were easily attracted. As time went by, however, customers had to be enticed with discounts and other specials.

He said pet food delivery today is getting the welcome that pizza delivery received in the early 1980s. But he expects that will change. “Five years from now, there will be a lot of pet food delivery businesses, and people will be calling me to ask what the specials are here.”

One person who has already experienced the highs and lows of the business is Pete Padilla of Thousand Oaks. Padilla has run the Big E-Nuff pet food delivery service for 11 years.

“It’s very difficult for anyone to make a living at it. It took me a couple of years to come out of the red,” said Padilla, who caters to private homes, pet shops and kennels. “Some businesses started because it looked like an easy way to make a living. But people found it was difficult because you need to have a good client base and you need to buy cheaply enough.”

At its peak, Big E-Nuff had about 800 regular clients, but the list is down to about 300, Padilla said. “I haven’t promoted it in recent years. A lot of customers have moved. Dogs have died,” he said. “And some of the major discount stores have cropped up since I opened and they have taken some of my business.”

Shellie and Fred Luton of Newbury Park are the new couple on the delivery block. Since last September, the husband and wife have run the Ventura County franchise of The Pet Pantry, Intl. The Nevada-based company, which produces its own brands of dog and cat food, has about two dozen franchises in the United States, about half of those in Southern California.

“Delivery is becoming more of a needed service,” said Shellie Luton. “The people we target are middle- to upper-middle income, where husband and wife are both professionals who don’t have time to go out and get food.”

Pet food delivery services are a direct competitor of pet stores, but Don Holloway, for one, hasn’t felt an impact.

“Definitely not,” said the owner of the Pet Company store in Camarillo. “They are very small, and frankly, with the profit margin on dog food, I don’t expect them to last for long.”

Holloway, however, recognized the potential consumer benefits of such delivery services. “It’s strictly a convenience,” he said, “especially for elderly people who don’t get around easily.”

Twain Lockhart, owner of Newbury Park Feeds, said his store has lost some clientele to delivery services, but those same customers continue to come in for pet accessories.

And Lockhart, himself, recently began offering free delivery.

“Delivery is pretty new to the industry,” Lockhart said. “What’s happening, as with a lot of businesses, the huge corporate superstores are coming in. The locally owned mom-and-pop stores might cost a couple of bucks more, so we have to make it up with service.”

Lockhart said he is about to take pet food delivery a step further, by setting up a Web site on the Internet, through which he hopes to drum up pet food business.