Advancing Our Foods

DogStar features 25,000 square feet of cooler space capable of holding 600,000 lbs of ingredients from over 50 meat, fish, and poultry ingredients, plus dozens of fresh whole vegetables, fruit, and home-grown botanicals.

Not every fresh ingredient is available year round, so we equipped our DogStar Kitchen with nitrogen freezers capable of flash-freezing seasonal foods such as fresh, whole wild-caught fish and farm-fresh produce, to preserve their goodness for future use.

Each ACANA and ORIJEN cooking line features dedicated, custom-built, high-capacity ingredient mixers capable of blending any number of fresh meats, vegetables, and fruit, and sized to reflect the dramatic increase of fresh meats in our foods.

Following fresh meat blending and prior to steam-cooking, our unique votator heat exchangers bring chilled fresh ingredients to room temperature without introducing water or steam, which enables us to add even more fresh meats into our foods.

Referred to as “the most significant preconditioning development for extrusion cooking in the last 20 years,” our high-intensity preconditioners were custom-built for DogStar, feeding fresh meats from the votators to extruders at rates previously unheard of, and without high temperatures.

At the heart of our kitchen is a twin thermal extruder which is fed fresh ingredients from our high-intensity preconditioner. The first of its kind in North America, it took 11 months to build and features custom steam injection to enable high fresh meat inclusions and a gentle cooking process which helps further reduce the carbohydrates in our foods and preserves their natural goodness.