Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the tails.com webinar vet lunch and learn. The reason we're doing this today is we've been asked on social media quite a lot, some questions about kind of what is the tails.com proposition.

How does it work? I, you know, a lot of vets and nurses saying, I've got clients that come in and they're feeding their dog tails.com, and I just really don't understand what you mean by tailor-made or I don't know how you tailor diets to the individual dog, or I don't really understand what goes into your food.

So the purpose of today's lunch and learn is really just to answer some common questions and if you don't know much about us at tails.com, hopefully you'll know more by the end of the hour. I'm hoping that we'll have some time for some Q&A for any of you that are joining live.

If any of you do have questions, you're welcome, more than welcome to ask them on the webinar vet Facebook page, where they've posted the link to this web lunch and learn, and I'll try and answer them during the week. So to start off with, I think, a good place as any to start is our TV ad which some of your clients and some of yourselves may have seen which briefly explains what we do tails. If I can get the video to work, let's see.

Here we go. Tails.com, unique nutrition, made just for your dog, because every dog is different.

You go online. Yeah, you tell them all about your dog. It's top to tail healthcare.

His coat is lovely and shiny. They tailor the food for your dog. Oh, he likes beef.

He genuinely loves his tail's food. Right now, try two weeks of your unique recipe for free, all at great tails value. Go to tails.com and tell us all about your dog.

Yeah, so as I say, many of your clients may come in and say they're feeding tails.com. You may have heard of us in passing, you may have seen some of our advertisements on TV or on the internet, perhaps on your own Facebook, and so on.

But who we are, Tails.com formed in 2014. A group of animal lovers, dog lovers, vets, and, and nutritionists.

Just thought that actually the pet food industry. Really didn't cater to every dog very well and, there wasn't really much personalization there and there wasn't much kind of, in the way of kind of catering to dogs with multiple needs and so on. So, they came together to create a solution, lots of very talented people and kind of with tech background and digital marketing background, and, kind of food technology backgrounds to say, right, I think actually we can do something better for dogs.

So. The the crux of what we do at Tails.com is provide a unique recipe for every dog based on their individual needs in a taste they love, with the nutrition they need.

And we cater to healthy dogs, you know, with, fairly easy to solve, nutritional needs, and we cater to dogs with multiple needs that where their owners are finding it very difficult to to find an off the shelf solution. To their nutritional needs. And our purpose really is to improve the lives of dogs and their owners.

Our long term vision is to have changed the world of pet food for good. And in my kind of humble opinion, I think we are doing that. We're a tech company that is doing something that no other brand is doing in terms of bespoke nutrition.

So I just want to talk to you about how we do that and why we do that and, and kind of the, the, give a bit of transparency around it. My background is I was a clinical vet for just about 6 years in clinical practise, domestic and exotics, mainly, and always had an interest in nutrition. I did an undergrad degree in animal science and when I decided to start looking at a kind of industry role or role outside of clinical practise.

I kind of came across tails.com and thought if they're doing what they say they're doing, then that's a seriously impressive concept and product and service. And I've been with the company now for 3.5 years and haven't looked back and really thoroughly enjoying kind of being part of the growth of, of the business.

But effectively what we do, our promise as a brand is to provide unique nutrition for each dog. And when I joined up and when I started looking into tails.com, 3.5 years ago, 4 years ago, I was a sceptic, and I think a lot of you, if you're joining us on the lunch and learn, probably have a degree of scepticism too.

We're sceptical of us vets and nurses, and that's absolutely fine. I'm very much, into kind of evidence-based medicine and as As they're all new. But I was a sceptic that how could a company, you know, be profitable while producing individual diets or unique, unique nutrition for each dog.

So hopefully this webinar will show you how. But what do we mean by unique nutrition for each dog? There's really 3 components that we, we say, kind of makes up unique nutrition for each dog.

The first is the right nutrition and the taste that the dog loves. The second thing is the right portion, which is really, really important. And the third part of our kind of overall brand is the personal service.

So. We say, and I say quite a lot to that we are dog food as a service, not just a product. So those three kind of pillars of our brand promise are really, really important.

And the result of providing those in a way that no other pet food brand is doing, in my opinion, is that we have a happy and healthy dog and a happy owner at the end as well. So just to go into detail on those kind of three components of our brand promise, the right nutrition means providing dogs with the right food to solve one or many health issues. As I say, we cater to healthy dogs as well as dogs with multiple nutritional needs or health needs.

Looking to have people looking to have a healthier dog in general, so ones with no specific health issues, but where we can give them quality ingredients and really wholesome nutritious food that will keep them happy and healthy for a long time. And then also in the taste they love, it's really, really important. So there's no point in us providing food for a dog if they don't like the flavour or don't enjoy their food.

So, dogs that are very, very fussy and owners that, you know, have had a dog that they've really struggled to find a dry food that they liked often tell us that they absolutely relish their tails.com food, and I'll talk to you about how we've worked on that in terms of the palatability of our food over time. The second part, which is super, super important, and you guys will all know the importance of this with, you know, overweight and obese pets coming in, providing the right portion.

This is an area of confusion for a lot of pet owners because traditional ways of, of selling and presenting pet food to the consumer can be quite complicated in terms of feeding the right amount. You know, when, when we, when Owners are faced with a table, you know, of feed this amount of grammes to this dog, if to your dog, if they weigh between this many kilos and this many kilos and all of those kind of tables can be very, very confusing and people are scratching their heads and they're telling us that they find it difficult to, to work out how much they should be feeding of a particular diet. We're trying to take that confusion away and we're asking the right questions to get as good an idea as possible of what each individual dog needs in terms of calorie allowance per day.

So we're giving that very clear guidance to owners on how much they should feed their dog to suit their dog's body weight, condition and lifestyle factors. We're also being providing quite a helpful service on in terms of portion control on getting their dog to the right weight. So whether that's losing weight or whether it's gaining weight, we want to get every dog to an ideal body condition and we've provided very easy tools to allow dogs.

Owners to to to do that if they use our system correctly. It's not foolproof. We get asked all the time, you know, oh, I had a client actually, their dog lost weight on tails.com.

That will happen occasionally. It's not foolproof to have, you know, a vet nurse wait clinic where it goes, you know, 100% right, 100% of the time. There's a compliance issue here.

So you can lead a horse to water. So we've provided the tools that that we think our customers need, and if they use them in the way they're they're designed, hopefully the aim is that every dog will get to an ideal body condition and obviously that has knock-on effects on their welfare and their longevity and their happiness. The third part, which is quite unique at Tails.com and what we offer is a personal service.

So we provide professional support. We've got a highly trained and award-winning customer experience team on hand on phone and email support and live chat on our website. To talk through any problems that our customers have, whether it's to do with their delivery, whether it's to do with their dog's nutritional needs, even potential customers, you know, you don't have to be a customer to to utilise that, that team's expertise and advice, and we have vets like myself, and we have qualified PhD animal nutritionists on board on hand to help out with any nutritional needs that that you might have or questions you might have about your dog.

The other thing which our customers absolutely love about us and is one of the secrets to our success, I suppose, is that the owner, the customer is in complete control of their order and of their tails.com service. So we're not a subscription business that ties people in.

To, you know, a direct debit every month or sends people, you know, a product they don't want. We place it entirely in the control of our customer and they love us for that. So you can use tails.com the way we've designed it, but you can also make it work for you by moving your deliveries around or putting them on hold or pausing or cancelling whenever you want as well.

So that control and flexibility is part of the the personal service that we offer. And the result of all that. The right nutrition and taste they love, the right portion, the personal service is that we generally get, most of the time a happy and healthy dog and a very happy, customer at the end.

Which I hope you've heard, from your own clients. Now, in terms of our team, I won't go into the details of all of us, but some of the key members, myself, I'm the full-time head vet and manager of veterinary Affairs at Tails.com.

I'm in the office, 4.5 days a week. I work from home a little bit at the odd time if I've got some research or or studying to do, or CPD to do.

But most of the time I'm here full time, working as, as a head vet for the brand. We've got our PhD Doctor Samantha Ware, lead nutritionist, who works remotely and in our Heathrow based office. And, we've got Amy Henson, who's our RVN, in, in our Richmond office here full time.

We've also got several RVNs on our remote team as well, that are on our customer experience team. So we've got, veterinary and animal nutrition experience here. In spades, and, we train the customer experience team to be able to answer a lot of the frequently asked questions that our customers would have about their dog's health and nutrition.

How it works for anyone that doesn't know, I'll just skim through this quite briefly, but some of you may not be familiar with how it works. Our whole proposition is based on a 1 to 1 relationship with each owner and their dog or dogs. And basically the way it works is a customer comes to our website and signs up by entering the.

Dog's details and and seeing what kind of recipe we would create for them. Now that process takes about 2 or 3 minutes. And what we do in that process is we capture all of the nutritional inputs that we need to create the ideal diet and work out the ideal portion for that dog to keep them happy and healthy.

And then we blend a range of kibbles. So our main offering for tail for the tailor-made offering is our dry food. We do have wet food and the treats range as well, which I'll come to later.

But the, the, kind of most of the tailoring aspect comes through our dry food. And we have a huge range of kibbles that we've designed and developed in-house exclusive to us, that we, our algorithm basically works on those nutritional requirements to create a recipe for that dog. So we're our algorithm is selecting down to macronutrient and micronutrient level what that dog needs at that point in its life when the customer signs them up.

And what happens then is that individual recipe is packaged up at our Heathrow, factory, and it's personalised with the dog's name and their unique blend details on a, on a menu card for them. So we get asked sometimes, you know, what ingredients are in your food or show us, show us what's in your food or show us a typical nutritional composition. Unlike other manufacturers who produce maybe 15 or 20 products that they put on the shelf, we don't have a nutritional typical composition because every bag of food can be technically slightly different.

They're all unique recipes. Now they could be different based on kind of micronutrient mineral levels, for instance, for certain dogs with similar needs, but they are all uniquely different. It's not the kind of the sceptics, .

View and certainly my view at the at the start, when I started looking into it and questioning it, it's not a marketing gimmick with the dog's name on a bag of kibbles and there's only, you know, 10 blends. We say we have over a million possibilities of what we can do in terms of unique recipes. Once that recipe is made and the dog's sticker goes on there and we know what, what recipe that.

Or what dog that recipe is for, it goes out on delivery to the customer and it's left in a place of, of their choosing, safe place if they're not in. We include in that delivery any of our other range as well that the customer has selected. So if they want wet food and treats and dental shoes and so on and poop bags as part of their delivery, we'll include those in the box with the, with the dry food.

And it's delivered to them with a . A free adjustable scoop and the scoop is part of our, our kind of clever algorithm. And the algorithm will select what the recipe should be for that dog at that point in its development or that point in its life, but it will also calculate based on several factors, how much of that specific recipe will provide the dog's calorie allowance, and it will calculate on Which scoop size of ours and which scoop setting will deliver that calorie, daily calorie allowance to that dog.

So it's very clever calculations going on to basically give a bespoke recipe for the dog, but also a bespoke feeding plan and and portion size for the dog. Now, if the owner wants to continue with us after a free trial, so normally we offer a free trial because we, we think feeding is believing, and most of our customers who try us out on a free trial actually say this is great, my dog loves it. It's very handy, it's quite affordable.

I'm actually going to stay with you. And then it goes on to an auto replenishment cycle, so the owner never runs out of food or never has too much, hopefully if we've got the quantity right. If we don't have it quite right, they can they can get in contact and.

We can tweak that. But it's an auto replenishment cycle of every month, every 31 days, we send you out more food. But what we, what we don't want to do is send you out food or bill you for food that you don't want.

So uniquely amongst subscription services, we email each customer just before their food is due to run out and say, Didi's food is due to run out this week. We're about to prepare her, her next, her next recipe, her next bag of food. But you can delay, pause or cancel from this email.

So we make it very, very easy for the owner to manage that if they don't want to receive the delivery. We don't want to create a recipe for a dog, and where their owner doesn't want to receive it. A waste of food.

And the final thing we include in that box is a feeding plan, which is personalised to that dog, which gives the typical, gives the ingredients and the nutritional composition there as well. So we sometimes get asked, why don't you publish what's in your food? Why don't you, you know, where's the transparent?

Around what's what a typical recipe looks like. That's done on a case by case basis and it's included in their delivery and it's also available when an owner logs into their online dashboard. They can look at what's exactly in their dog's food that month.

So that's a unique thing about us and why we don't just publish 15 recipes online because we've got many, many more than that. Each one is unique. So, why, why do we think this is important and why are we doing what we're doing?

We're doing it because we know the importance of quality nutrition and feeding the right diet, to, to dogs. We've seen studies and, and you guys have probably seen studies as well, on various, kind of factors to do with diet that can extend the dog's lifespan sometimes by up to 2 to 3 years, in certain cases. There's been quite interesting studies done on this.

And I think the 3 things for me that constitute a good diet. The first one is fundamental, is using high quality ingredients from the start. You know, if you start with high quality, you're going to get, you know, good results from it and you're going to get good, what I call backend performance in terms of stool quality as well.

Does is tailoring to a dog's individual needs. And that can be through tailoring the ingredient composition, taking into account dietary exclusions if there's certain dietary ingredients that dogs are intolerant or perhaps allergic to. We can exclude those, no problem.

Tailoring the macro and micronutrient profiles to a dog's life stage, for example, or owner preference as well. Including nutritional kind of supplements or nutraceuticals in, in, a dog's recipe because they have specific nutritional needs. And also recommending our product range to a dog or not recommending certain aspects of our product range, to a dog because of their, their nutritional needs as well.

So all of that tailoring is going on kind of behind the scenes and we're recommending hopefully the right thing to to each dog on an individual basis. And the last part of feeding a good diet, what does that mean? I feeding the right amount and controlling the portions and giving owners supportive, supportive, helpful guidance on how much they should be feeding and taking into account what else they're feeding as well.

We do ask those questions. So again, as I said, you can lead a horse to water, and we sometimes get asked, you know, or, or told that we didn't get it right for a certain. For a person or for someone's client, we can't get it right 100% of the time if a customer doesn't tell us the whole truth of, you know, if they're feeding toast or the odd sausage or or something like that on a regular basis, we need to know about that.

So all of those things vary according to the individual dog's needs and our problem to solve really is to try and cater to those dogs on an individual basis at scale. Now, why nutrition is important, the WSAVA World Small Animal Veterinary Association, a couple of years ago now recommended that in any veterinary exam, we should all as, as clinicians be doing a nutritional assessment. So it's the 5th vital assessment after TPR and pain assessment is a nutritional assessment.

They say that that should be performed on. Every patient at every visit to the vet clinic. Now, you and I know that that's not always practical in a 10 minute consultation time maybe or a 15 minute consultation time with a lot of clients waiting in the waiting room.

You're not going to be able to perform a nutritional assessment at every visit. But I would say that what we do at Tails.com is kind of take that burden away in, in some respects.

Because you can be confident in saying, if you go to tails.com and enter all your dog's details, they're going to recommend what your dog needs. So it's a different way instead of trying to work out based on the individual do in clinic, oh, I think I should choose this product because I'm going to prioritise this health condition or this allergy over joint problems or, you know, a history of pancreatitis.

Actually, we can do all of those things and it's a different way of recommending a food where you say, if you go to sales.com, they'll get the diet right for for your dog. So it's, it's quite helpful and a lot of vets and nurses who who are recommending it are seeing really, really good results on that.

It's kind of taking away that burden of what product should I choose for this dog on a case by case basis. Now we're a tech company and this is one of the things I want to be quite transparent on and how it works because I think most of the scepticism about how we could do what we say we're doing comes from the the logistics of how could you possibly create unique recipes. And I think, to start off with, you know, being a tech company and being way ahead of the curve on kind of food technology, personalization.

And kind of data driven approach really does set us apart from some of our off the shelf pet food competitors. Our algorithm that we use to, to, before I start talking about the algorithm, actually, let's talk about our our food itself. But in the very early days, we realised that we would need to have a huge range of kibbles, each with known nutritional composition.

To be able to cater to all dogs at all times in their life with multiple needs and just, you know, very easy to solve needs. So we created a range of kibbles and our food team is constantly tweaking and improving and testing and expanding our range and maybe delisting certain cables that aren't performing as well as we want. So the number of kibbles fluctuates from time to time, but rough ballpark figure normally is we have around 50 different products at any one time.

And our algorithm basically knows all of the, all of the nutritional composition down to micronutrient level is fed into our system and our algorithm knows what's in every kibble and basically can calculate then the nutritional composition on blending those kibbles together. So starting from the start, owner comes, gives us their name, their email address, tells us all about their dog in that 2 to 3 minute online consultation. And those nutritional inputs get fed into the algorithm, and within seconds it can come out with a recipe designed for that dog, blending several of our kibble range together and amalgamating the results of those into a recipe and a nutritional composition for that blend of kibbles.

So, over a million possibilities, it's large scale. We're not, this is, I think, where some of the confusion, arises. We're not cooking and making the individual bag of food on a bag by bag basis.

We're cooking and making all of our individual exclusive to us kibbles and holding them, and they're freshly made, so, you know, we're we're going. Go through massive quantities week by week. It's not a single product mass produced and stuck in a warehouse for 68 months, 12 months before it's bagged up and distributed.

It's made fresh and every month we're replenishing each dog's order and sending it out. So that's how we do it. We do it at scale by creating our kibbles at scale and then sending them out according to what our algorithm tells us is the right blend at this point in time for that individual dog, and then we're making up the individual bags there and then.

Because we're data driven, we're, we've really got quite unique insights into a lot of things surrounding palatability over time. We've been going 5 years now. When I talked about testing a few seconds ago, I don't mean test taste testing.

I mean looking at consumer trends, looking at what That, how long that customer and their dog stays with us and analysing based on what kibbles went out, what recipes went out, and what proportion of certain kibbles in in recipes went out, and then looking at kind of customer retention. So we're constantly improving based on our kind of data insights. I talk about it a few times so far being creating a recipe for that dog at that point in time.

But what happens over time? What if a customer comes to us and says, I'm, I have a puppy aged 6 weeks or 8 weeks, and it's a Newfoundland, for instance, or I have a, you know, 3 year old, Jack Russell. We have modelled.

This is a very early part of our our development and and something we've kept up to date with current research and, and, and the latest kind of information on. We've modelled growth curves for every breed of dog, over their, their entire life, and we've looked at the kind of recognised nutritional requirements of dogs, over those kind of, time periods as well, breed by breed. And our algorithm will model exactly what the dog needs throughout its life.

So even if a customer doesn't come back and tell us, you know, anything that their dog, anything that's changed with their dog's health or or nutritional needs, we can model what that that dog needs over time and Gradually and automatically we adjust what is in that dog's recipe over time so that we know that the macronutrient levels are balanced, for instance. Calcium and phosphorus levels will change gradually and automatically over the course of a growing dog's life span from puppy into adulthood. So the owner can rest assured that their dog is getting a 100% optimised diet over time.

We call that process blend evolution. It happens automatically and gradually, and we can guarantee that that the dog is getting exactly what it needs and they don't have to worry about when does my, you know, cross breed, when does my Jack Russell, when does my Saint Bernard turn from a puppy into an adult. We have that covered and we don't believe that that's a step change that should occur overnight.

I talk about our data. We are a data-driven company. We employ data scientists to look at our database of UK dogs, and we are quite privileged to be sitting on a database of UK dogs that is unrivalled in number and detail.

I talked to one of the data team this morning about how many dogs are in our database altogether over the last 5 years of any information that was inputted into our system about dogs, and she did a quick calculation, and the figure was 2.7 million. Now some of that might be just they've entered their dog's name or there a couple of details and have left, but we're sitting on a huge, huge database of UK dogs, and I obviously all protected and, and, GDPR compliant, but we can do a lot with that data, and that's why we employ data scientists to look at us, look at.

Our data, analyse it, give us business insights, give us, kind of dog health insights and some really clever things. Watch this space. I'm currently working on a project with our lead data scientists, which we should be publishing, hopefully early next year on, longevity and and dog health.

So, really clever stuff. Some of it boggles my tiny mind, what, what our data team can do, but we're uniquely positioned with that database, to, to learn and know a lot about UK dogs and their owners. An example of one of the kind of areas that, that, that really helps us out with is palatability.

So as I mentioned earlier, we can test the outcomes of our recipes like no other brand because we can monitor individual consumer behaviour. So we can look at, we can do heat mapping of, you know, certain kibbles in our range or what our wet food recipes are doing and how happy our customers are with us, how long they stay with us, why they leave if they do leave. If they cancel and say my dog didn't like the recipe, we can look into that data and say, do you know what?

Actually, this kibble, number 167, which is a chicken and beef flavoured kibble, is performing, rather poorly in terms. In terms of customer retention, we're finding that when it's included in a dog's recipe at a level more than 67% or 37%, that owners are twice as likely to cancel in the 1st 3 months. So those kind of insights that no other brand has when they just put a product on a shelf and kind of look at their sales figures in total, they don't have the traceability that we have on our really granular data-driven level of recipe by recipe, dog by dog.

We can also look at kibble relationships so that the kind of circular chart on the right-hand side of the screen. We can look at kibble relationships and say, when this kibble is combined with this kibble, palatability goes up or palatability goes down. So palatability is something that we take really, really seriously.

And on Veterinary Voices UK on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, there was a question asked, Does anyone use tails.com? How does it work?

What's your experience of it? And one of the things that I dread to see, and it really disappoints me when I see is someone saying, oh, I tried it for my dog, but they didn't like it, so tails didn't work for me. If we don't get it right for your dog first time, and we can't, our algorithm can't get it 100% right for every dog, you know, we can't solve for every.

Fussy dog. If we don't get it right first time though, and the dog didn't like the food, that's not a reason to say Tails.com didn't work for my dog, because if you let us try again, we can create still a 100% optimised diet for your dog, but, but we will use different cables and different ingredients until we get it right and your dog likes it.

So we're very, very good at palatability and we get lots of customer feedback saying, you know, my dog wouldn't eat dry food until, until he's gone on to tails. He's doing really well now. I see that there's a couple of questions coming in.

What I'll do, just type your questions in the Q&A box if you have your mouse above, you'll see a Q&A box and I'll answer them at the end, as they, as they come in. Just write them in the box there. That's fine.

In terms of health conditions, what we do for every dog that that is fed tails.com is, weight control. Hopefully, again, if an owner use our system the way it's designed, the aim is to get that dog to an ideal body condition and weight.

So we provide a personalised calorie calculation, feeding plan and portion scoop. It's based on several factors, mainly weight, body condition score, which we ask owners to do and educate owners on how to, how to body condition score their dog, and also biological and lifestyle factors. So, you know, neutering effect, activity levels and stuff like that.

There's a little bit of subjectivity, I suppose, in there, so there's always a bit of variance. And again, we say, if you know, you know your dog, you know your dog better than we do. So if we haven't got it absolutely spot on and your dog is gaining a little bit of weight or losing a little bit of weight, Let us know, update their weight on their online dashboard, and we will adjust the calorie allowance accordingly.

So if they come back to us and they update their dog's weight as they lose or as they gain, if they're intending a weight weight gain or weight loss diet, they do need to come back to us about once a month or every couple of months and give us the updated weight, and then we have a better kind of line to work from in terms of calorie allowance. But if we don't get it right, initially, you can just get in touch and we can, we can tweak that individually as well. We're getting a lot of feedback from vet nurses, that are starting to use tails.com as a tool in their weight clinics where, you know, a client comes in and they're struggling with an overweight, pet, and, vet nurses saying try tails.com, let's do it together.

Let's sign up together and get the right inputs in there from the start, . And come back to us in a month and we'll weigh Hugo again and and we'll see how they're getting on and we'll update the weight there. So actually, we're, we're seeing great success and we're hearing reports of great success for vet nurses are using tails as a tool in their weight clinics to to get owners on board and more engaged with how they're feeding their dog and, and ultimately what they're feeding their dog, dog food or otherwise.

Yeah, if we, if we get regular, updates over time, we can predict the growth curves and and adapt those calorie requirements over time. And on a month by month basis, that can change. So we basically say when we send a new scoop setting, we, we mention that on the menu card.

Your dog now has a new scoop setting which is going to provide an adjusted calorie amount for this month. Moving on then, other health conditions, I'll run through these fairly fast, but other health conditions that we can cater for, and bear in mind that we don't just provide some skin and coat recipes or some joint recipes. We cater to these health conditions on Based on the individual dog's needs.

So if a dog has skin issues, pancreatitis, and joint problems, we can solve for those problems in the one recipe. We're not just a, you know, a diet for one condition or two conditions, we can cater to multiple. But in terms of skin and coat, we can support a range of dermatological conditions, and we can also just support kind of maintenance of healthy skin and glossy coat.

So typically what we include are beneficial levels. Of essential fatty acids, balanced omega 3 and 6 from oily fish, normally, sometimes from linseed as well. Also, if there's kind of allergies involved in skin disease or itchy skin in particular, we can exclude certain ingredients and that can also be very, very helpful.

So we get a lot of, very positive feedback from owners of itchy dogs or just owners of dogs where after moving on to tails, they've seen a massive improvement in the condition of the skin and coat. In terms of digestion, obviously skin and digestive issues, two of the most common reasons for dogs to be brought to a vet clinic and very much influenced by diet. Digestion, we can cater to a number of, of, digestive problems.

Our customer team. Are very well trained in in solving for those if if customers get in touch. But just in general, if an owner tells us the dog has sensitive digestion, we can support that with including kind of beneficial fibre sources, so balance soluble and insoluble fibre sources.

Inclusion of things like prebiotics, so like foss and moss, that are a natural kind of food source for beneficial bacteria, in the gut and help support overall, gut health as well. Joint disease, we can help support painful or stiff joints, arthritic dogs in several ways. Weight control is the big one there, obviously, you know, having a dog in ideal condition much better in terms of pressure on sore joints.

So that's 11, really impactful way that we can help. The other ways we can help is inclusion of certain ingredients. So the only clinically proven.

Anti-inflammatory, kind of ingredient that's clinically proven to have anti-inflammatory effects in joint disease is omega 3 fatty acid. So we'll include that in, in most of our, recipes if you've said that your dog has joint problems, at a beneficial level. We can also include dietary supplements for nutraceuticals like glucosamine, chondroitin, and MSM.

I've done some other webinars for the webinar vet where I go into the, the theory and the jury being out on whether or whether or not those are effective or ineffective. You can have a look back on the, the kind of, history tells.com webinar vet, free CPD there to go into it in detail, but we can't cover that today.

Pancreatitis is very, very easy for us to solve because we are in complete control of macronutrient levels and we can put a cap level on fat percentage, for example, very easily on a dog's account for life. So that's very simple for us to solve. And again, Some of the prescription diets for that kind of lose out on palatability.

We can maintain palatability and solve for pancreatitis very, very easily. So normally we automatically limit dietary fat to less than 10% if a customer has told us that their dog has had a history of pancreatitis, but we can go as low as 6.5 or 7% quite easily as well for most dogs depending on their other needs as well.

We only show our product range that's suitable for, for pancreatitis dogs, so we don't show our wet food ranges, for example, that are too high in fat, percentage for those dogs. Treats the same thing. We don't recommend any of our product range for a dog where it's unsuitable based on their health needs.

So there's a bit of tailoring that goes on there with the rest of our range as well. In terms of allergies and intolerances, perceived or, or real clinical ones, we can help with that, in a number of ways. So, we help dogs with kind of skin disease and that are related to food allergies, as well as dietary kind of intolerances resulting in in digestive upsets.

If customers don't know what their dog is reactive to, whether it's kind of skin issues or digestive issues, if they don't know what the dog is reactive to, there's a very easy option on the sign up, consultation, where they can select hypoallergenic. And what we do then is we exclude our top 5, food allergens, beef, wheat, dairy, soya, and egg. If they want to exclude further ingredients, if they suspect or know that their dog is reactive to those, they can go ahead and do so as well.

So they can exclude maize, grain, chicken, fish, or lamb. They can get down to single animal protein, grain free, whatever combination, they, they choose, whilst again being kind of confident in the fact that their dog is still getting an optimised diet. We do also have some hydrolyzed proteins in our range.

We get asked, you know, are you comparable to kind of prescription and allergenic food? I would be completely transparent here and say we're not comparable to an allergenic. We don't have as clean a facility in producing our hypoallergenic blends as some of the extreme kind of 100% hydrolysed protein prescription products out there that some dogs need.

But we find a huge success rate, with, with dogs that maybe aren't so severe, and the owners want to try us out and we actually are quite affordable for owners where they're struggling, to, to afford prescription diets to meet those needs as well. In terms of puppy nutrition, one of the first projects that I worked on, with the, the food team and product team when I joined Tails.com was catering to puppies under 12 weeks.

And we really want to give puppies the best start in life and support new puppy owners, as well on their, on their dog owning journey from the start. So what we do with puppies is a little bit different. They have a fortnightly feeding plan, from 6 to 14.

Weeks because their calorie needs and their their nutritional needs are changing quite rapidly. So we send out a delivery every 2 weeks until they're 14 weeks of age, and then it goes to monthly after that. And the three main areas we've focused on catering to and and kind of boosting in in puppy in our puppy range, are digestive function.

So we're including very digestible sources of protein. Like chicken and fish, for example, we're including prebiotics, and we're also including beta glucans, from yeast extract, which have been shown to support the kind of maturation of the digestive system and the challenges, immune challenges that faces. Nucleotides, as well as beta glucans shown to boost early immune development and antibody responses, vaccine antibody responses even, and also gut defences, in the mucosa of the intestinal system.

And the third area that we focus on is mental development and vision development as well. So we include salmon oil in all of our puppy range of foods to boost the omega 3 fatty acid DHA. Now DHA is decosahexanoic acid.

It's found in mother's milk, but if studies have shown that if you supplement it post-weaning, the puppies will have improved learning and socialisation outcomes, and the vision development is improved as well when DHA is supplemented in the diet post-weaning. It's not a, a cheap ingredient to include, but we include it in all of our puppy, puppy range. Those are the things we cater for on, our normal online consultation if a customer just tells us about their dog online and our algorithm creates a recipe for them.

But if their dog has more complex needs or things that aren't listed on our website, and we don't list everything we can cater for on our website because we don't want to, Offer that up and owners mistakenly check a box and say my dog has diabetes, for example. So we have this dedicated nutrition and vet team to help with those more complex cases. Customer just needs to get in touch with us on hello at tails.com or on the phone and tell us their dog's needs, and our team will find out, you know, what we can do for them.

So it doesn't end at what you can find on our our 2 to 3 minute consultation online. If you have a difficult problem. Do to solve or you can just get in touch with us or the owner can get in touch with us and we're happy to discuss what we can do for them.

And we're very much a company that will say, if we can't cater for you or if your dog is better off on something else, we will tell you that. So we frequently turn away potential customers by saying, no, actually we can't cater for your dog's nutritional needs. You're better off going and speaking to your vet vet nurse about what what is the best solution for them.

Things that we don't cater for, you know, we're not a prescription food. We get asked sometimes, are you prescription diets or do you do prescription diets? I would say that it kind of needs a little bit of a definition.

What is a prescription diet versus what is tailor-made food. A prescription diet is a single product that caters for all dogs with one condition. A tailor-made diet is a diet that's designed for the individual dogs needs and caters for that health condition, as well as all the other needs as well.

But there's certain things that at the moment in our product range, we can't cater for. So, urinary stones and dissolution diets we don't do. Renal and hepatic disease, we say, much, much better off on prescription diet.

In a couple of cases where the dog just literally will not Eat any of those prescription diets, we will give an owner a choice, and we will say, look, we can get your dog's diet to within very close to what they need or matching, very closely matching the prescription diet, but it's second best and it's up to you whether you want to try your dog on it for, you know, the kind of time they have left and them enjoying the food is very, very important to to some owners and they say with, you know, the. 100% knowledge that this is second best, we'll do as, as well as we can to match your prescription diet, but our recommendation is a prescription diet. We don't do enter or parenteral nutrition.

We don't do much in the way of convalescence diets either. So just as an example, 3 dogs in our office, Monty, has a history of pancreatitis and also has suspected, Spike's disease. He does seem to do better on a gluten-free diet, and he is catered to very well.

Frank, then, not much in the way of kind of specific nutritional needs, but, owner kind of, Gemma selected for skin and coat. She wanted his skin and coat to be glossy, so there is boosted levels of Omega 3 and 6 and fatty acids in there. Smaller kibbles, kibble sizes is one of our tailoring aspects.

We're not going to feed tiny kibbles to Zeus, the next guy, Alaskan Malamute. Zeus is an interesting one. He's a rescue dog, and he unfortunately has hip dysplasia and we're including extra joint support in his, in his blend as well, omega 3 fatty acids as well as those supplements.

So that's just an example of, of what we can do for, for certain dogs' needs. We're at the stage now where we're feeding, we have in terms of our active customer base, so those that are not in kind of paused or delayed state, the ones that are actively receiving food from us every month is over 150. 000 dogs and counting week on week, that's going up, each with their own unique recipe, and most of them very, very happy with us.

And our customers, what we didn't realise when we set up was that our customers love to speak to us and love to tell us, that we are kind of . Succeeding in our, in our vision or in our purpose to change the lives of dogs and their owners for the better. So we're getting constant feedback on how we're doing that all the time.

It's really, really great to see and really motivates the team here. Vets and nurses also are using us and, leaving us quite positive reviews, in general. This was a few months ago, I did a search on Trustpilot, which is an independent review site where you can review your garage or your butcher or your veterinary practise or your pet food company.

And at the moment, we're on over 18,000 reviews on there. Most of them are 5 star, excellent, rating on there. But I do a search.

For, keywords on, on veterinary, vet nurse, vet, and we have over, we had over 430, several months ago reviews from vet professionals on Trustpilot giving us positive feedback. If you're sceptical still after this webinar, which is absolutely natural, do go on Trustpilot for 10 or 15 minutes and just scroll through some of the reviews and see what our customers are saying about us. You may find some vets and nurses on there giving us, reviews as well.

Price, we get asked about, OK, if you're producing kind of individual diets, bespoke nutrition for, for dogs, and you're providing this delivery service and sending it out so it never runs out, that must be a very expensive, thing. So a lot of people are, are kind of put off or wary. Of the price of our product.

We are comparable to what people are used to paying off the shelf or kind of supermarket level or pet shop level, high street brands basically, or, or kind of common consumer brands. We're comparable in price to those, but I believe that our proposition is, is, is much better value. And the reason we can do what we do at a comparable price that people are used to paying, there's a couple of reasons.

The first one is that we're direct to consumer. So we are selling that dog's food directly to their owner. So we're cutting out the middlemen of wholesale and retail that are applying a markup on that food at each step of the process.

We're also asking owners what they currently feed their dog for two reasons, because number one, we're doing what we call ingredient profile matching. And what we're doing, when I say ingredient profile matching is we're looking at the ingredients and the type of food that dog is currently used to feeding. Because if we fed, if we take a customer and they say, I'm feeding X brand of food, and we know in our system that that food is .

Really based on cereals and meat meals. And if we take that dog and we say, OK, well, we're going to improve this dog's diet, we're going to put it onto a 60% fresh meat, grain-free, cereal free type of food because we believe that's higher quality. That food is probably going to give that dog a digestive upset in the first week, and that customer is going to be very, very unhappy, possibly coming down to you guys with the dog with diarrhoea.

We're going to get a bad review. The customer's not going to stay with us and it's going to damage our brand. So we do ingredient profile matching because we want to get every dog onto a similar type of food that they're used to, that they'll transition on to well, and that they, but we always want to improve the quality of the food.

So we get asked, you know, where are you in the, in the terms of the dog food market? Are you, you know, supermarket owned brand, or are you kind of mid-tier, or are you high tier or are you like vet only prescription level? We actually have products in our range so that we are all brands.

We can cater to all kinds of dogs and we can cater to all kinds of sectors of the market. Now what that does, when we talk about price of, of pet foods, price is intimately linked with ingredients. So if we're producing some recipes that are meat meal and cereal based, but they're higher quality than what the dog, the brand maybe the dog was on before, we can produce a similar priced recipe for that, for that, that owner can afford as well.

So our prices really, really vary depending on what the owner is used to feeding their dog, what the dog is used to eating and can tolerate in terms of transitioning onto our food. And also what the owner is prepared to pay. So it ranges.

If a dog has, you know, multiple needs and only only can have hydrolyzed salmon and grain free, that's going to be much more expensive than a dog that can have any of our meat sources and is OK with kind of cereal and and grains as well. Just a word on that, grains and cereals are a natural and healthy and nutritious part of a balanced diet. You know, they are, they are part of that.

We've seen the grain-free trend take off. We've seen the fallout on that in the states with some cases of dilated cardiomyopathy, potentially related to grain-free diets. So, we give the consumer choice if they want grain-free, they can have that, but it is more expensive if they choose grain-free.

So it ranges completely. We don't have a typical price. Some dogs, you know, a chihuahua feeding 50% tails.com might be paying £6 a month, a Great Dane feeding 100% with, you know, quite complex needs and discerning tastes and only eating salmon could be paying 70 or 80 pounds a month.

It just depends on how much we're feeding and what goes into each bag. Our range, I'll speed up because I know there's a couple of questions we want to get to. Our range of products is dry food, wet food, 15 wet food recipes.

Again, the selection or the offering is tailored depending on what you've told told us your dog can and can't have. We have dental shoes as well. We have various treats in our range, and our customers kept asking us for poo bags, so we also provide poo bags in their delivery.

For convenience sake. And, all of the, the details and everything of what goes into all of our products is available online in your online dashboard for your dog. And it's also included in the feeding plan or the menu card that you get in your box in your delivery each month.

So we're not hiding what's in our food. It's just based on an individual dog basis, what we, what we, showed to you. Just a little bit about what we've done so far in the veterinary community.

Some of you, you're on webinar vet now, you're probably quite familiar with the fact that we put on, a range of free CPD lectures, for the veterinary community on dog nutrition. Two of them in particular were very popular, and if you haven't seen them, you might want to go back and watch them. Dispelling the myths and misconceptions around canine nutrition, back in October, in 2017, and then in September last year, I did a raw feeding, webinar which was quite popular or controversial to some, but it was a review of the evidence base for and against raw feeding, so that might be one of interest to some of you if you haven't seen it.

We also launched, last year at BVNA Congress, which is rapidly coming up. We launched a free feeding and referral scheme for vet nurses, . Basically to try and get nurses to see for themselves what tails is and try it for themselves so they understand the concept and understand the product and service we offer.

We said feeding was believing, so we gave over 1500 vet nurses six months of free food for up to 2 dogs. Quite a generous, programme. It has ended now.

It always had a life span, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive on that, and many vet nurses are still feeding tales, which is great to see. We got 3 awards in, the Veterinary Trust Awards in 2018 as well. Most enjoyed webinar, best pet food company and, favourite speaker.

It's a little embarrassing to say that. We do have an upcoming webinar again, next Tuesday night. So I'm going to be talking about pet foods and feeding, ethical, sustainable, and welfare concerns.

It's very, very topical at the moment. There's a lot of interesting stuff, reading and writing slides, as we speak this week, and it should be a very, very interesting topic. So I'd encourage you all to, to tune into that if you can, or at least register and watch back later if you're not free on Tuesday night.

So with that, I think, we do have a few questions. Let me just see. So, Karen has asked you to do exclusion diets for allergy testing?

Yes, Karen, we can do exclusion diets, so owners can tell us if they get their results back from their allergy testing and they have a list of foods that they, they need to exclude. They can just get in touch with us, our customer team by email, live chat or phone, and we can see what we can do. If we can't cater to them, we will tell them that.

So if there's going to be You know, small level low levels of something on that allergy test that the dog is reactive to. We're not going to send that out to the dog. So we see great results and very affordable options for owners of allergic dogs and we get great results on on that.

So yeah, the answer is yes to that. Stephanie has asked, what's the average cost versus Royal Cannon or hills in practise. Again, as I think I answered, hopefully, the cost varies depending on your dog's needs and what they're, kind of used to in terms of ingredients or what you've asked for in terms of exclusions and so on.

But normally we're matching the kind of same price arena as customers are used to paying. Sometimes it's a little less, sometimes it's a little more, but you're also factoring in in terms of value, delivery, not running out of food, having the personalised service, that you can ring up as many times as you like, and, we will help you out with your dog's needs. So I would say it's, it's comparable, or, or some often better in terms of kind of prescription diets that get the same results.

We get the same results as some of those. Kirsty has asked, are the slides available to view after the seminar? Yeah, they will be.

They'll be there online, probably for the next year or so, and, you can watch them back later, no problem. There's also if you just search for tails.com on Webinarett, we've sponsored the vet nurse series with lots of guest lecturers this year.

There's lots of cool and free content on there and you can see all of the webinars I mentioned earlier, on there as well as recordings. So, no problem watching them back after. Kirsty has also asked, will there be a cat diet coming?

Great question, Kirsty. The answer has always been, yes, we do want to get in, we do want to do tailor-made diets for cats. At the moment, in the short term, it's, it's not in development.

We've done a little bit of research and as you all know, a cat is a completely different animal to a dog and cat owners even are quite different to dog owners. So, although we have learned a lot in the last 5 years, we would almost be nearly starting a brand new business to go into cat. So it's not in the short term future, but it is in our our medium term future that we want to, want to do that.

Laura has asked, is this for UK only or worldwide? I wish we were worldwide. We're not quite at that level yet, but our vision is to have changed the world of pet food for good.

And we're on track to do that. At the moment we are currently feeding dogs in the UK and France. We, we launched in France, late last year and it's going very, very well, there in France.

So UK and France for now, but watch this space for further expansion. Then we have a question. Anything available for training or behaviour type issues, for example, calming or eating own poo.

Eating on poo, we don't provide anything, so, that's generally behavioural advice or, some advice on kind of adding in, . Compounds or or products that make the taste poo poo taste even more unpleasant than poo already does. But in terms of calming, yeah, we can actually cater quite well to kind of nutritional support.

I always . Emphasise that it's support or an aid when we talk about dietary interventions in fear and anxiety related behaviours. But we can boost levels of L tryptophan and glutamate, for example, which has been shown to have calming effects in dogs or increase kind of the serotonin production and things associated with or that's helpful in fear and anxiety cases.

So yeah, we can we can cater to behavioural problems quite well. Just scrolling through and I think that's it for questions. If anyone has a final question, doping it over.

But, we are just on time to finish. If, as I say, you do have any more questions, if you're watching this back. As a recording and you want to ask anything.

If you go onto the webinar vet Facebook page and just look for the post that announced today's lunch and learn webinar, I would be more than happy to check back in on that over the week and answer any questions that come up there. Or if you search for tails.com.

And tag me on Facebook. My Facebook vet profile is Sean McCormack MVB. So more than happy to answer questions there.

Or if you have a question or you want to email in about a certain case or talk to us, our email address is [email protected]. So, with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today.

I'd also like to remind you of the upcoming webinar next, Tuesday evening. On pet foods and feeding, ethical, sustainable and welfare concerns. And actually I think we just have one more question.

No, that's it. So, thanks again for joining and it's over and out for me.