When You’re Thrown In, You Swim: How Amy Zalneraitis Scaled We Feed Raw into a Category Leader

It started as a small kitchen operation, hand-delivering meals to local dog owners in the Texas heat. No fancy warehouse. No marketing team. No plan to take on the billion-dollar pet food industry.

Then, in an instant, everything changed.

Amy Zalneraitis found herself holding the keys to a business she’d never planned to run — in one of the most complex, unforgiving categories in DTC: cold chain logistics, national shipping, and entrenched competitors with decades of dominance.

What happened next? She didn’t just keep the business alive. She scaled it into the leading direct-to-consumer raw pet food brand in the U.S. And along the way, she discovered that growing a company changes you just as much as it changes the market you serve.

In this episode, Amy shares how she:

• Navigated cold chain logistics — and avoided costly mistakes
• Built a brand with an ethos strong enough to win over a skeptical market
• “Panic learned” her way through fundraising, operations, and scaling challenges she never saw coming

At its core, this is more than a story about pet food. It’s about pairing creativity with operational excellence, staying bold in the face of entrenched competition, and knowing when to reinvent yourself — and your business — to keep growing.

Whether you’re a founder scaling your first product, a brand strategist looking for inspiration, or just someone who loves a good underdog story (pun intended), this one’s for you.

Connect with Amy:

• We Feed Raw Instagram HERE
• Amy's LinkedIn HERE
• WeFeedRaw's Affiliate Program HERE
• We Feed Raw is a subscription-based raw dog food company on a mission to disrupt the norm and make healthy, biologically appropriate food accessible to as many dogs as possible. No more compromises. No more settling. No more ultra-processed junk for an entire lifetime. Just meals dogs' bodies were made for delivered directly to your doorstep.