At the age of 16, I was looking for affordable food for the family’s sled dogs. I noticed then that only the fillets are used for human consumption of salmon, but good fish is wasted along with the salmon’s head, tail and backbone. Dogs might like this!
A few other local sled dog owners also wanted their share of the first loads. That’s how I started the company when I was 17 years old.
The business of Speeddog, which was founded in 2015, initially started with my mother driving a trailer of salmon boxes, the next day when going to work, my mother took the trailer to Kairatie Teboil in Rovaniemi, and in the afternoon after high school classes I cycled to sell the salmon boxes from the trailer. Customers were mainly found in the Rovaniemi Koiraporukat Facebook group. An average customer bought 20 kg of salmon.
Since then came a driver’s license, a bigger car, a wider customer base and bigger orders. Marketing communication also developed, but the best advertising pictures and videos were made by customers. A large number of new customers came as recommendations from other customers. The first 1,000 kg load went on sale in 2018.
Originally, the dog food salmon box contained backbones, tails and heads. At the request of customers, salmon head and spine boxes were also available for sale.
The load on the environment has always been small, as the distribution of salmon loads has mainly taken place along with food transports. In addition, salmon are traditionally packed in styrofoam boxes that have been used once, in which whole salmon were originally brought to Finland from the shores of the Arctic Ocean. In general, salmon is grown in Norway for the fillets, so using leftover fish parts as dog food does not burden the environment.
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Best regards: Tuomas Notko, 0407297022