Sudbury deli has furry fan base: Max's Deli offering made-in-house pet food and treats from locally sourced producers.

• Author: McKinley, Karen
• Position: Small Business Focus

A new delicatessen in Sudbury is offering quality, ready-made meals with ingredients from local producers.

Sounds like a familiar story, except it's not for humans.

Max's Deli is strictly for canine and feline customers.

Steve Kneller opened his shop in a strip mall at 893 Notre Dame Avenue in August, with the intention of offering natural pet food made completely in-house, using ingredients from regional farms.

"It's all human-grade, meaning I use methods used to produce human food that is safe and nutritious," Kneller said. "I've been working on this for about seven years, feeding it to my dogs, and it seems to work, so I'm sharing it with the rest of the world."

The business is named after his Austrian shepherd Max, which Kneller said has never eaten kibble in his life, only food he's made.

He sources his meat from Triple Star Acres in nearby Blezard Valley, and Pure Island Premium Manitoulin Beef.

Natural pet food isn't new, but Kneller says his stands out as it is completely local, made on-premises, and sealed in plastic bags and slowly cooked in either a giant hot water bath, known as a sous-vide, or an industrial-sized drier.

Those methods, Kneller said, help seal in both flavour and nutrition, as well as making them safe enough for pets to eat, with minimum risk of passing on bacteria to humans.

All his ingredients are listed on the packaging, as well as on boards in the store, so everyone knows what is in the food.

Dried treats, like bully sticks, chicken feet, beef liver and spleen slices, and parts like the trachea of cattle, as well as dried vegetable chips are also available. Some come in reusable glass packaging for easy refilling or recycling.

"The natural chew treats, they have a lot of nutrition like glucosamine and chondroitin, very good for their skin and bone health," Kneller said. "Plus, especially for the tracheas, they are fibrous, so they are really good for cleaning teeth."

The deli is constantly working on new products, such as custom cakes made from their own food production scraps, new types of treats and custom pet food orders.

Kneller also stocks a variety of popular dog toys, dishes, and other supplies like leashes and grooming products.

To make pet food on a mass scale, he had to design a giant sous-vide vat cooker and heating and cooling system just for his store. He took his designs to a local machine shop and worked closely with them to create a system that cooked accurately and ran efficiently.

"It's a...