CORE K9 Repurposes Ingredients to Cook for Pets

Sometimes loss can inspire the creation of something beautiful. Felicia Cordray and her husband Manuel founded CORE K9 in November 2023, inspired by the loss of their 11-year-old Cane Corso, Dutchess, who had been diagnosed late with lung cancer.

Though the Cordrays had kept up with Dutchess’ health, the tumor went unnoticed during check-ups, and to this day they didn’t know how long she had it by the time the vet caught it. Once diagnosed, it was too late to do chemotherapy treatments. The loss devastated Felicia.

“It was a pain that you never forget,” she said. “It’s just like losing one of your kids, especially when you have them [as] part of your life for so long.”

She wondered if there was anything she could have done differently to prevent Dutchess’ plight. Her first consideration was diet.

The Cordrays had been feeding their dog kibble for most of her life and thought there might be a correlation there. They had changed Dutchess’ diet just before she passed and noticed a huge difference externally.

“I grew up and I had pets in the country where I grew up with my grandmother,” Felicia said. “The dogs will get what was left over from your dinner and there really wasn’t any kibble back then.”

Felicia and Manuel began gently cooking meals of chicken and rice for Dutchess, often using unused ingredients from their company, Catering by Cordrè. They noticed a transformation in the dog’s fur, how much she shed, how she smelled, and other changes.

“Within the last year of her life, we just noticed that there was a difference with her fur. It was a difference with how much she shed. It was a difference in how she smelled. It was just a lot of little things there that were pretty different once we switched her diet over.”

When the couple took in two maltipoos, they decided to feed them a more enriching diet from the start, repurposing unused ingredients and food scraps from their catering company into gently cooked dog food.

That led to the launch of CORE K9, a dog food brand that does the same at scale, reducing waste from the catering company while providing their canine companions with the best possible diet they could provide.

We talked to Felicia Cordray about launching CORE K9 and the benefits of gently cooked dog food.

Queen City Nerve: Why is gently cooked food better for dogs than kibble?

Felicia Cordray: A lot of people don’t really know about gently cooked dog food. There are some people that are aware of it and then some people that just know that there’s a kibble for them. Then quite a few more people know that there is an option to do a raw diet. But I just would like to let everyone know that there is an alternative to those two, and that is the gently cooked dog food.

Kibble can sometimes not be the healthiest option, and some people are afraid of the pathogens and the salmonella and the possibilities of using the wrong food when it comes to the raw diet. When it’s gently cooked, it’s cooked at low temperatures to maintain those nutrients that are needed for our fur babies, and it’s a better option. It’s there for them, and it’s a new option. And I would just like to make it known that it’s a lot better to feed them gently cooked than to feed a kibble.

I will say that I wish that I had this option when my dog was still around. His story is similar to yours. He was 11, and one day, I noticed that he was having trouble going to the bathroom, and I took him to the vet, and they found a lump, and it was really aggressive. He was gone probably two weeks after he got that diagnosis. I sometimes wonder if there was anything I could have done differently.

We don’t know what we don’t know. I felt the same way you did. I felt awful, especially after we lost Dutchess. I started doing the research and you see a lot of videos and you hear about the processing of kibble and how it’s made. You get a lot of people that talk about allergies and whatnot, and they typically want to say that it’s chicken, which I’m not saying that it’s not, [but] it’s rarely chicken.

A lot of times you’ve got these pet parents that think that their dog is allergic to chicken when really, in reality, if you look at the ingredients on the back of the kibble bags, there’s so many different things that are mixed in those ingredients that you really don’t know what it is that’s causing the allergy or that’s causing the licking or the ear infections. It’s hard to narrow it down.

With CORE K9, with our product, I’m very proud; you look at the back of our ingredient list and you know exactly what it is. It’s in every batch of food that you get. And then the bottom of it is nothing but vitamins to help them with what they wouldn’t be getting in their protein or the vegetables that are included in the recipe.

What led to this decision to repurpose the ingredients you used for humans into dog food?

We’ve always worried about ways to make sure that you don’t have as much waste … utilizing most of the products [we need]. I like to tell a lot of people the example is when we’re in the kitchen and our chef [Manuel] is training his team, he will tell them to mix something like one of our dressings. When they mix all the ingredients together, you mix it in the container and then you pour it into whatever it is that needs to be poured into. A lot of people will take that dish, and they just take it back to the sink and rinse the remaining residual ingredients from the dishwasher or down the drain.

A lot of times what my husband will do is scrape the sides of the walls of the container and then pour it into another container and let them see how much could have been wasted if they had just thrown it down the drain and washed it. We’ve always been cautious about our waste. So, when we were able to come up with this idea for dog food, it was a no-brainer.

Where do you sell your products?

We started out selling e-commerce online, and we still do. Customers can go to the website and look at all the different options that we have. Now we have partnerships with Pet in the City on Monroe Road, Earthwise Pets in Matthews, McCoy’s Feed & Supply, Earthwise Pets in Simpsonville, South Carolina, and Woof ‘n Hoof in Mint Hill.

Berrybrook Farms is our most recent store, and that’s not a pet store, that’s more of a health food store. And so now we are looking to work with more local, independently owned pet stores to partner with them to spread the word and get the product in their stores so they can offer it to their customers as well.

Have you  considered expanding to serve other pets?

I’m almost always asked at least once if we have anything for cats. I have not started just yet with coming up with the recipe because it’s a long, lengthy process. I like to do my research to find out what ingredients are healthy for cats and what’s the best for them and just what they can eat and what they cannot eat.

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Then I work with a good nutritionist to find out what else is missing from those ingredients that need to be added. Then it must go through the Department of Agriculture and everything. I plan to start working on that and I would like to have a cat food line by maybe the year 2026.