Cooper Farms recently announced that it now offers human-grade turkey ingredients for dogs. The company’s ingredients come from turkeys raised by family farmers who supply Cooper Farms with the sustainable sourced protein demanded by pet food manufacturers and their customers.
“Cooper Farms’ venture into selling pet food ingredients began about five years ago,” said Lynn DeArmond, new business development manager at Cooper Farms. “We had a major pet food manufacturer contact us looking for someone to produce ingredients to their specs and almost immediately, we found a niche market that was not being filled by other pet food suppliers. a mixture of giblets.”
The customer is looking for natural proportions of livers, hearts and gizzards, but gizzards cannot be sourced without foreign material. Sales presented the challenge to Cooper Farms’ engineering and fabrication team, and, within days, the group designed equipment capable of splitting the gizzard open and cleaning it before it was attached to hearts and livers to crumble into a natural mixture of proportions.
“Listening to the customer has allowed Cooper Farms to offer some unique products like bone cake and bone residue,” DeArmond said. “I like to assign a customer’s request to our research and development department because they always meet the challenge.”
Some of the products currently offered include:
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MST – Mechanically Separated Turkey
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Gibs (giblets)- heart and liver
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Boneless, skinless wing meat
Produce typically leaves Cooper Farms fresh at 2,000 lb. combo. In the rare event that customer specifications require frozen, Cooper Farms will send them to one of its partner facilities to be frozen before shipping to the customer.
According to DeArmond, Cooper Farms welcomes customers to tour the plant to see how ingredients are made.
