In an interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Jacqueline Prehogan, Co-Founder & CEO of Open Farm, discussed the company’s journey and commitment to ethical practices. The idea for Open Farm began with Jacqueline’s personal shift toward sustainable eating, which inspired her and her husband Isaac to create a similar option for pets. They launched Open Farm in 2014 with a mission to produce pet food that prioritizes animal welfare, sustainability, and transparency. Jacqueline highlighted the challenges of building a supply chain focused on humane practices and shared how Open Farm overcame these hurdles by partnering with farms committed to high standards. Their goal to integrate these principles into the pet food industry has driven innovative products that resonate with eco-conscious consumers and contribute to the overall wellbeing of pets.
Jacqueline Prehogan is a Co-Founder and senior leader at two of the pet industry’s most influential, high-growth brands: Open Farm and Canada Pooch. Jacqueline is the Chief Brand Officer and Co-founder of Open Farm, a premium and ethically sourced pet food brand committed to raising the bar on the way we feed our pets. In this role, Jacqueline leads the brand’s Mission & Impact programs and guides strategic brand direction. Jacqueline is also the CEO and Founder of Canada Pooch, a leading pet lifestyle brand that designs premium functional gear for pets and their parents. In her role, Jacqueline drives the company’s strategic direction, with a focus on brand and innovation strategy.
Jacqueline, could you share about the moment that sparked your passion for pet nutrition and led you to found Open Farm? How did your personal values and experiences shape the company’s mission?
My husband Isaac and I were inspired to start Open Farm by our own food journey. From childhood, animals were always my passion, but I grew up eating meat with my family and never thinking much about it. Early in my career I had an experience that changed my perspective when I found myself stuck next to a transport truck carrying pigs during a snowstorm. As we inched along together, I wondered where the animals came from and where they were going. This experience set me on a path to learn about how animals are raised on factory farms. I learned that the conventional system views animals only as inventory, without considering their quality of life. This experience changed the way that Isaac and I viewed food – we wanted to know where our meat came and how it was raised. At that time we had two pugs and wanted to feed them the same way, but we found that a humanely raised and sustainably sourced pet food didn’t exist. This inspired us to create our own pet food, and in 2014 we launched Open Farm with a Mission to Do Some Good for Animals and the Planet. We have been obsessed with the pillars of our Mission – animal welfare, sustainability, and transparency – ever since.
Open Farm has experienced significant growth since its inception. Can you describe some of the challenges you faced while scaling a mission-driven startup like Open Farm, and how you managed to overcome them?
We could see that pet parents wanted higher standards for their pet food, and that there was whitespace for a brand committed to higher animal welfare and sustainability practices. However, our initial challenge was creating a food that would live up to those standards in practice. We knew we had to source meat only from farms and ranches with extensive animal welfare practices and certifications. This was a difficult task because the supply chain simply didn’t exist in the pet food industry – the higher welfare farms sold into natural grocery and had no interest in working with a pet food company. We had to build our farm network one brick at a time, literally knocking on doors to convince these farms to work with us. We went on to build a best-in-class proprietary supply chain, working with many of the most progressive farms and ranches in the world.
What strategies have you implemented to encourage innovative thinking and how have these contributed to your product development?
My goal has always been to demonstrate that consumers don’t need to choose between great products and sustainability, but that sustainable innovation actually yields better products. Innovation starts with a culture where people live and breathe the brand, but also feel safe enough in their environment to bring forward big ideas and take risks. One of our core values is to “raise the bar” which means that, as a team, we need to have big dreams, keep pushing for better and view obstacles as opportunities. This is the core thinking that permeates every aspect of our business, including how we bring our Mission to life and how we create industry leading products.
Open Farm is committed to regenerative agriculture and sustainability. Could you elaborate on how this commitment is integrated into your business operations and product lines, and the impact it has had on the pet food industry?
I’m passionate about regenerative agriculture because it is at the cross-section of everything that Open Farm stands for – animal welfare, sustainability and nutrition. Our goal is to not only advance agriculture in our own supply chain, but to help other companies integrate it into their supply chains so we can collectively convert more acres to regenerative practices.
We began our regenerative journey by baselining regenerative agriculture in our existing supply chain and setting a goal. To do this, we partnered with the University of Missouri’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture to create a regenerative framework, and surveyed all of our existing protein suppliers against that baseline.
We already worked with some of the most progressive farmers from an animal welfare perspective and were encouraged, but not surprised, to learn that many of our farmers were already implementing and measuring regenerative practices. Our baseline assessment represented over 550,000 acres across 5 countries with survey responses from 15 suppliers.
From here we set our ambitious goal: by 2030, Open Farm will advance regenerative agriculture practices across one million acres of farmland. This goal will mean we need to 10x the regenerative acres in our supply chain.
We have hit the ground running by identifying opportunities to fast track our growth of regenerative acres by 1) working with existing farms to increase their regenerative acres 2) helping pre-regenerative farms in our supply chain implement the practices to become regenerative and 3) onboarding new regenerative farms to our supply chain.
This initiative transcends the pet food industry, and our goal is to help drive transformation across the agricultural landscape.
Looking ahead, how does Open Farm plan to maintain its rapid growth while staying true to its sustainability goals?
As Open Farm has grown, we have doubled down on our commitment to animal welfare and sustainability. Not a decision is made at Open Farm without a Mission lens. Since our very first bag of pet food, 100% of our meat ingredients have carried 3rd party animal welfare certifications and were supported by innovative sustainability programs. Our 6-person Mission team (including myself) manages our extensive Mission programs and standards, and works cross-functionally to manage their integration into our operations. But Mission is also everyone’s job at every level of the organization. Many people come to work at Open Farm because it’s more than “just a job;” it offers people the opportunity to have an impact at work every day. Our mission is deeply embedded in our team culture, and we live and breath it every day.
