Shop Where It’s Made: Why We Built an Open-Door Raw Pet Food Kitchen in Red Deer

How many people can say they can walk into a pet store and actually talk to the people who made their dog food? If you’re in the Red Deer area, put your hands up! 🙋♀️🐾

Picture this: you walk into a brightly lit retail space. In one section, freezers are fully stocked with raw pet food boxes, including convenient full meal deals and foundational blends to mix and match based on your dog's unique requirements. In another section, shelves are stocked with dry foods, treats, and supplements to complement any dietary philosophy.

But here is the best part: as you shop, you can look right behind the swinging doors and see a real production kitchen—machinery completely sanitized after every single batch, and a dedicated team in boots, gloves, and aprons handling real, raw food.

This experience is a reality at Four Roots Pet Products. It is truly the first of its kind in Alberta.

The Four Roots Mission

Four Roots was founded in 2024 by a group of people who saw a need for something new in the Alberta raw feeding market. The founders—Melissa, Hauke, Amanda, and Matt—noticed that the commercial raw pet food market in Alberta was moving in the exact opposite direction of why people turn to raw feeding in the first place.

In our experience, people choose raw feeding because they want simple, natural ingredient lists they can actually trust. But as raw food has surged in popularity across Alberta, a market with very little regulation has left the door open for everyone to jump on the bandwagon.

Unfortunately, this lack of regulation often leads to frustrating shopping experiences for pet parents:

🐾 Unrealistic Pricing Expectations: Many raw food manufacturers allow distributors to dictate their own pricing. This sets an uneven playing field for small businesses and creates mass confusion for the consumer about what true, high-quality raw food should actually cost.

🐾 A Lack of Accountability: There is currently no regulatory requirement for raw manufacturers or distributors to update their ingredient lists or offer current analysis sheets for the blends they sell.

🐾 The Illusion of Choice: Some distributors sell pet food under their own private label without any transparency regarding where the food is actually manufactured. This gives the end-user the illusion of having options, when in reality, they might be buying a product they've already tried (and that their dog didn't like—resulting in wasted time and money).

We deeply value your time, your hard-earned money, and the mental load that goes into feeding your furry family members. This is why we set out to operate as if raw pet food is a strictly regulated business in Alberta.

Our core tenet for achieving this standard is simple: absolute transparency. ---

Under One Roof: The Four Roots Manufacturing Story

Before we dive into our pillars of transparency, we want to give you a quick background on The Complete K9 story and how it came to fall under the Four Roots umbrella. It can be confusing for some people, and since our goal is total clarity, the backstory matters!

The Complete K9 was founded in 2010 by Don and Colleen with a clear goal: to make affordable raw pet food that didn’t skimp on quality. It was no easy feat, but they did it. Over the years, they built a dedicated community of pet parents who appreciated their straightforward approach to making DIY raw feeding easy and accessible.

Tragically, their facility experienced a devastating fire in 2022. This led to a series of events that ultimately ended with Don and Colleen passing the torch to Don’s daughter, Melissa Wierenga. (If you’ve stopped in to shop at Four Roots, you already know and love her—it’s hard not to!)

After the fire, Melissa worked closely with Hauke at Family Meats in Ponoka to rebuild the brand. During this rebuilding phase, they connected with their now-business partners, Amanda and Matt Monsma of Grand Dog Essentials.

Today, Four Roots proudly carries on The Complete K9 legacy while simultaneously manufacturing premium, nutrient-targeted blends under the Four Roots name. Our two brands are manufactured under the very same roof, perfectly complementing one another to provide a wide array of options—from customizable DIY raw components to convenient, balanced full-meal boxes.

The 4 Pillars of Absolute Transparency

1. Ingredient & Formula Integrity (No Sneaky Recipe Swaps)

We don’t play games with your pet's recipes. There are no hidden ingredients, no sudden protein swaps, and no shifting ratios just to save a dollar when market prices fluctuate. If we ever make an intentional update to a formula, our email subscribers are notified immediately, and our website and labels are updated in real-time. No surprises.

Our delivery partners at Grand Dog Essentials know firsthand how crucial this level of honesty is. Before partnering with Four Roots, one of the biggest challenges they encountered was navigating the sudden, unannounced recipe tweaks that are unfortunately common in the raw pet food industry. When a client's dog suddenly refused their food or suffered a mysterious allergic flare-up, it triggered a constant search for answers that simply weren't being provided by the manufacturers.

Feeding a pet with health sensitivities already comes with a heavy mental load. When your pet's health changes, you shouldn't have to become a detective just to find out what's in their bowl; you need facts so you can make the best choices for their well-being. We aim to entirely eliminate that mental load by putting all our information upfront, so you never have to go searching for it.

2. Sourcing with Integrity: The Canadian Inspected Chain

We source our ingredients from Canadian-inspected facilities, utilizing components packaged for the human-grade food chain. The single exception to this is our green tripe—because no human wants an unaltered tripe on their dinner plate, but our dogs thrive on it!

Sourcing from the human-grade chain means your pet food comes with built-in safety standards right from the start. Take the Avian Flu as a real-world example: Canadian meat producers have rigorous protocols to ensure affected flocks never reach the market. If Avian Flu is detected, the positive flock goes into immediate quarantine, and depopulated birds are never sold for food.

For us, this means we might occasionally face a temporary shortage of turkey, duck, or chicken because our supplier halts distribution from an affected area. The problem is stopped right at the source before it can ever reach our kitchen or your dog's bowl.

Because we buy from the human-grade chain, our pricing is directly tied to real market costs and availability. To put it in perspective, the average cost of ground beef for consumers in Alberta hovers is $6 - $10 per pound. If you are buying raw beef pet products that are priced drastically lower than regular market meat pricing, it's a good time to have an open chat with your supplier about their sourcing standards and where that meat is actually coming from.

Why isn't our green tripe human-grade? ➡️ Our tripe used in the raw pet food is cold washed and unbleached. The limited processing preserves a massive array of beneficial digestive enzymes, nutrients, and probiotics for your dogs and cats. Human-grade tripe, on the other hand, is heavily scalded and bleached to make it visually appealing for human consumption, which strips away all those raw health benefits.

3. Formulated with Intention & Science

Our Four Roots fruit and veggie blends—Bow Beef, Creekside Chicken, Pine Pork, and Timber Turkey—are meticulously crafted to meet strict National Research Council (NRC) standards.

If you’ve ever been to the vet, they might ask if your raw food is AAFCO certified. Here is the easy way to answer that: The NRC is the scientific research body that determines the foundational nutritional requirements for dogs and cats. AAFCO actually uses this exact NRC data to build its own commercial pet food guidelines. When you feed Four Roots fruit and veggie blends, you can confidently tell your vet that these blends are formulated directly to the gold-standard scientific data that AAFCO is built upon.

While the Four Roots line is specifically tailored to these precise NRC nutrient targets, that doesn’t mean our The Complete K9 blends aren’t perfectly balanced and suitable for your pack. It simply comes down to your personal feeding philosophy. Whether you prefer a precise, nutrient-targeted blend or a straightforward, whole-food approach, our team of pet experts is here to help you choose the best fit for your fur family.

No matter which line or blend you choose, we provide a full guaranteed analysis and complete ingredient list right on our website. From calorie counts to exact fat and protein levels, you have total visibility into exactly what is fuelling your pet.

🔍 Transparency Check: Currently, our boxes do not state “NRC COMPLETE” like some other brands do. The reason for this is simple, honest reality: comprehensive laboratory testing for a full product line is a massive financial undertaking for a growing independent business. While the Four Roots fruit and vegetable blends were carefully formulated from day one to align with NRC guidelines, we want to run a final, comprehensive lab analysis to officially confirm full compliance before printing it on our packaging. This is a milestone we are actively working toward and hope to achieve in the near future!

4. A Real, Clean Kitchen (Our Open-Door Policy)

We have an open-door policy. If you book ahead, we’ll happily show you where the magic happens. We aren’t a faceless corporate factory. When you visit, you’ll see a real production kitchen—machinery completely sanitized after every single batch, and a dedicated team in boots, gloves, and aprons handling real, raw food.

Let’s be real, it’s a messy business. It’s not pretty. On a production day, you will see meat products thawing on the production floor. Bins full of meat and organs waiting for the grinder and mixer.

Have you seen tripe before it’s been ground? It reminds us of a strange sea creature from the bottom of the ocean. And chicken feet—they make an absolutely fantastic bone broth, but visually? Ew!

But here is where the magic lies: after every single production run, our team meticulously breaks down, cleans, and sanitizes the manufacturing floor and machinery. By the end of the day, it’s like nothing ever happened. Maintaining a pristine kitchen means zero cross-contamination between different protein batches and ensures that no meats ever sit at temperatures that could breed harmful bacteria.

🔍 Transparency Check: Safety Certifications & Recalls Our ultimate goal is to achieve formal third-party safety qualifications (like HACCP certification) in the future. Much like laboratory testing, these official audits require a massive financial investment that we are working toward as a scaling independent business.

However, a lack of an official stamp doesn't mean a lack of strict safety protocols. In a market without regulation, we enforce rigorous, self-imposed standards every day:

🐾 Strict Cold-Chain Integrity: All of our raw ingredients arrive at our facility fully frozen and are immediately moved into secure, climate-controlled indoor storage. We never store meat outside or expose it to the changing Alberta weather, pests, or wild animals (a surprising practice that unfortunately happens more than you'd think in the industry).

🐾 Uncompromising Quality Control: If a batch comes off the line and we feel it is anything less than ideal for our clients, it gets thrown out. Period. We absorb the financial loss because your pet’s safety and your peace of mind are worth far more than a saved batch.

Connect with Your Pet’s Food Differently

Come Visit Us!

You don't have to guess where your pet's food comes from anymore—you can come see it for yourself. Next time you're stocking up, stop by our Red Deer counter, meet the team, and shop straight from the makers. Want a look behind the scenes? Just chat with our team at the counter or give us a shout ahead of time, and we’d be happy to show you around our production kitchen!

Find Us: 3, 4812 78 Street, Red Deer, Alberta

Retail Hours:

Sunday - Closed
Monday - Closed
Tuesday - 10:00-4:00
Wednesday - 10:00-4:00
Thursday - 10:00-6:00
Friday - 10:00-6:00
Saturday - 11:00-2:00

👉 Shop Four Roots Pet Products Online and join our newsletter below to stay completely in the loop on recipes, health tips, and local updates!

Written by: Amanda Monsma (she/her) Co-Owner of Four Roots Pet Products and Grand Dog Essentials

This blog post was written by a real person.  The ideas, stories, and information shared are all human created however it has been revised for clarity, grammar, and SEO optimization by Google Gemini.