“For an online business, we really love the people and customer side of marketing, and getting to meet our customers,” Halligan told Inside Retail. 

“We’ve done things like a magazine, and a single dog-owners night on Valentine’s Day to help people meet, but I don’t think we’re very good at online marketing, so we prefer more customer-centric ways of getting our brand out there: which is where Scratch Patch came from.”

It was the first time the business has done anything on this scale, but Halligan says it won’t be the last.

“I’d like to turn it into a regular thing. We had such a good time, and we got to meet people and sell the idea that we’re not just a company that gets dog food to our customers’ doors,” Halligan said. 

“If we want Scratch to be making customer-centric decisions, we’ve got to meet them and understand what they want, how they relate to their dog, and how they relate to the brand. You can’t do that from behind a screen.

“So, we definitely have it pencilled in next summer, and may take it on the road. Melbourne is our biggest market — about 40 per cent of our customer base is there — but there’s other cities that we’d love to visit as well.”

Scratch was founded in 2019 when Halligan and co-founder Doug Spiegelhauer decided they had had enough of corporate pet food. 

Following a 2018 report by the Australian Senate into the quality of Australian pet food after a big-name brand inadvertently caused the sickness and euthanization of nine dogs, Speigelhauer partnered with Halligan to make “transparency-led” dry dog food.

“Ninety per cent of our category is owned by the likes of Nestle or other international investment firms,” Halligan said. 

“It’s a really consolidated industry, it’s quite big, and nothing has really changed in a while. If you’re a dog owner, and you’re trying to do the best by your pet and trying to give your dog variety, there’s not a lot of it out there.”

The business started off with a single grain-free Kangaroo recipe which evened out dogs’ diets and helped many with chronic skin and stomach problems. Now, Scratch offers three different recipes which are recommended to each customer individually depending on their pet’s needs.

And while Scratch is definitely looking to grow, it isn’t looking at other pet food categories, such as cat food: staying firmly in its lane.

“We’re a business that thrives on doing the best thing consistently, not on doing new things all the time. We’re not trying to do a million things in order to grow,” Halligan said. 

“The more you do that, the more you tend to start doing things for the sake of it. Scratch doesn’t make fashion accessories, we make a nutritional product, and our focus is on making sure we’re the best at that.”