Our Story
Why I Started YummyChewz
I started YummyChewz because my own dog deserved better than processed imports. Three years ago, watching my dog Kip chew through a “premium” stick that smelled like chemicals, I realized I didn’t know what was actually in it. So I decided to make it myself.
The moment I knew Kenya’s beef was world-class
That happened in Laikipia, standing on red soil beside a Maasai elder named Letayio. He handed me a thin strip of sun-dried beef from his family’s herd. No salt. No smoke flavor. Just meat Bamkut chewed it slowly. It was rich, sweet, and clean—nothing like the bland, fatty feedlot beef I’d grown up assuming was normal. Letayio laughed at my face. “Of course it’s good,” he said. “These cows eat sixty different grasses. You think your factory cows do that?” That was the moment.
The Journey From Idea To Factory
From my Nairobi kitchen at 2 a.m., dehydrating strips on jury-rigged racks. Kip as quality control. Thirty-seven
failed batches. Burnt edges, brittle breaks, inconsistent drying. Local butchers thought I was crazy asking for specific tendons and ligaments.
Then I found a tiny shared facility on the outskirts of the city. One working exhaust fan. A secondhand dehydrator. Jane and Mwangi, my first two hires, who believed in the idea before I had a full bag to show them. We scrubbed floors together, figured out airflow, sourced directly from Il Ngwesi Group Ranch.
Eight months later, we shipped our first commercial order. The packaging was ugly. The label was crooked. But the
product inside was perfect: one ingredient, grass-fed, long-lasting, and odorless.
People buy from people, not factories
So here we are. That’s me in the dusty boots, Kip with his paw on the table, Jane holding a drying rack, and Mwangi
grinning in the background. No suits. No sterile white walls. Just a small team who actually feeds these chews to their own dogs.
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