Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Tom Gibbons, owner of Henry & Sons, a vegetarian dog cookie company, sits with Sunnyvale resident Christine Hatherly and company namesake 'Henry.' Hatherly started the original business as Lucky Penny.
Keen on Canines
Tom Gibbons is working hard at his Henry & Sons vegetarian dog cookie factory in Sunnyvale
By Susan Wiedmann
Photographs by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Several times a week, Tom Gibbons takes a walk in his neighborhood to parks where there are daily gatherings of canine friends and the people who love them. He also frequently stops complete strangers with dogs who happen to walk in front of his home in San Jose. At all times, Gibbons has with him small sample bags of his highly nutritious dog cookies, which he makes in a special bakery, using only ingredients fit for human consumption. He hands out the samples to the dog owners while the alerted dogs eagerly wait for their treat. But Gibbons' nearly two-year-old dog cookie business venture is much more about offering a top-quality product than about selling vast amounts of it.
"If I can't do something that I know is the best that I could possibly do, I don't even want to be involved in it," Gibbons says.
And Gibbons remains involved in this endeavor, with his hands deep in the dog-cookie dough that he mixes in a factory in Sunnyvale.
Gibbons was a full-time house painter five years ago when he met Christine Hatherly, who in the 80s had owned the successful "Lucky Penny" dog cookie company. She had made all the cookies by hand, but circumstances in her life caused her to let the business go. Gibbons and Hatherly say they think that fate somehow brought them together.
A painter friend had given Gibbons the option to give Hatherly an estimate to paint her house because he was too busy to do it himself. Gibbons got the job, but the close friendship and future dog cookie business almost didn't happen because Gibbons nearly quit immediately. "We got off to a rocky start on the paint job," Gibbons says about a lack of communication that initially developed between himself, Hatherly and her husband.
Things finally calmed down, and it was during the process of painting their house for a month that Gibbons discovered framed newspaper articles from the 80s about the Lucky Penny business. He became intrigued by the concept of highly nutritional treats for dogs, but Hatherly initially didn't want to even talk to him about it.
She and her mother had worked successfully, building up the Lucky Penny business beginning in 1979. But the older woman became very ill and passed away a few years later. She had repeatedly told her daughter to keep Lucky Penny going, but Hatherly sold it after her mother's death, initially staying on as a consultant. Within a year, however, the new owner went bankrupt.
In spite of Hatherly's initial unwillingness to discuss it, Gibbon's interest with resurrecting a form of Lucky Penny had begun. He says he called her many times during the year following the house painting, telling her about himself and about the many dogs he kept seeing in his neighborhood. She finally grew to know and trust him.
"I fell in love with his goodness," Hatherly says about Gibbons, whom she looks upon as a younger brother. "It was a match made in heaven."
"She basically said, 'Here are the ingredients, here is the information, take it and run with it,' " Gibbons remembers. It wound up being more like a slow walk.
During the two decades since Lucky Penny was created, Gibbons says, nutritional experts have changed their thinking about many ingredients used in pet and human foods. In addition, evidence about the relationship between some ingredients in foods and cancer continues to turn up frequently in the news. From the beginning of his involvement with the dog cookies, Gibbons did considerable research, always wanting to make top-quality dog treats. For more than a year, he and his girlfriend, Kathleen Capurso, Henry & Sons co-owner and chief operating officer, used their home kitchen to experiment with ingredients based on Hatherly's original cookie and the results of Gibbons' research. This was done in between his painting jobs and her work as a real estate agent in Willow Glen.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Henry & Sons owner Tom Gibbons right, with friends Tim Silva and Kathleen Capurso, have worked long and hard to get the dog cookie business off the ground.
Gibbons credits Dr. Walt McCall, a holistic veterinarian in Campbell, with teaching him a lot about nutrition for dogs during the past year. One day he just walked into McCall's office with cookie samples, and the two men have chatted frequently ever since. Although many people use treats containing liver to train their dogs, McCall is against consuming liver and says he thinks Henry & Sons training treats, kibble-sized products with ingredients identical to the cookie, make a great substitute. "Liver is an organ that has all the manmade toxins that the animal was ever exposed to before its slaughter," McCall says.
The Henry & Sons cookie ingredients include flaxseed, which McCall says is an important source of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. The cookies also contain carrots, which most dogs love to eat. Carrots have beta-carotene, a good source of vitamin A. Gibbons doesn't use wheat or corn because they can cause allergies, using barley flour and millet flour instead. Nutritional yeast, eggs, blackstrap molasses and vegetable oil round out the cookie picture. To preserve freshness, he uses the natural antioxidants vitamin E, vitamin C, lecithin and rosemary extract.
But everything has to be carefully balanced in the cookie mix. Gibbons explains that he periodically uses a couple of human food labs to analyze the ingredients in the cookies to determine how much of each vitamin is in an ounce of the cookies. The labs also determine the mineral content and the percentage of fat, fiber, moisture and protein, which is required on the packaging of all pet foods. Gibbons sends the labs' determinations to a pet nutritionist to make certain the cookies do not have too high an amount of any vitamin or mineral for dogs.
"Every now and then you want to update your analysis," he explains.
Quality can vary in carrots, for example, due to a number of variables, and Gibbons won't accept anything that is not of a very high quality. He purchases his produce only the day before and the day of a bake. Twenty-four cookies are in one bag, and the packaging indicates a "best used by" date, which is about six weeks from the date of baking. There will soon be a specially designed box to replace the bag. Down the short road, Gibbons says sweet-potato cookies will be available as an alternative to carrots, but they will also have all the other ingredients. His test bakes have shown that dogs like the sweet-potato option.
All Henry & Sons dog cookies are made in the special bakery in Sunnyvale. Two years ago Gibbons started to look for a "factory" in which to start his business and found an ideal location at 1168 Aster Avenue in Sunnyvale.
"The city of Sunnyvale has been wonderful and very cooperative," Capurso says.
Several plumbing and electrical fittings had to be changed and adjusted before moving all their expensive mixing and baking equipment into the factory. It took Gibbons and Capurso almost six months to convert the 1,200-square-foot space. Friends and family members have donated time in the bakery from the time the couple got the space nearly three years ago, but Henry & Sons is basically the result of Gibbons' unending daily efforts and energy.
"He does everything," Capurso says. "He bakes them, he markets them, he distributes them."
Two weeks ago Gibbons officially ended his career as a house painter, excited to make a full-time commitment to his passion--baking organic, vegetarian and nutritional dog cookies.
"We bake about 3,000 to 6,000 cookies every week," Capurso says.
Kathleen Capurso gets 40 pounds of carrots ready to be added to the all-vegetarian batter that will yield nearly 3,000 dog cookies at the end of the day. 'A carrot is worth its weight in gold' was Christine Hatherly's motto for Lucky Penny, and it now appears on the back of Henry & Sons business cards.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
According to Tim Silva--a friend who frequently helps out--they do not use any chemical preservatives in their cookies, which limits their shelf life to about six weeks. The recipe does not include any salt, baking soda or baking powder.
On a typical day at the bakery, the first thing Gibbons does is turn on the radio. After that the long process of making the Henry & Sons cookies begins.
"Roughly about 200 pounds of dough are mixed up for a full bake of 2,900 cookies, or 120 bags, with 24 cookies to a bag," Gibbons says. Forty pounds of peeled, chopped carrots are used, and mixing everything together takes about an hour. To form the 2,900 cookies, the mix is put into a cookie machine that cuts out the cookies, which then fall into a tray. That takes about another 1l/2 hours. The cookies need to be spread manually on each tray until 81 cookies fill it. Each tray goes into a slot on a standing rack with wheels before being rolled into a double-rack oven with a carousel.
Once baked, more hours are needed to cool off the cookies, remove them from the trays, place them into bags and twist-tie them closed. Until recently, Gibbons often did the entire process himself. He credits his family and a couple of friends with helping him when his time was scarce due to his painting job. Now he occasionally gets some help from individuals in a nearby vocational training facility for the bagging part of the process.
Gibbons and Capurso used to come home after work and then have to clean, peel and chop all the carrots before they went off to the bakery, often until 3 a.m. Before going home, they had to also sanitize everything they had used. They now have a source from which they can buy the carrots freshly washed and peeled, and they have an industrial-size food processor at the bakery.
On an average, Gibbons does a full bake twice a week. "Now we're at a point to where we're not only doing bags but we're getting bulk orders off our website," he reports.
Several local vets carry the cookies, along with Sam's Feed and Supply on San Carlos Avenue in San Jose and about 10 other Bay Area stores.
Gibbons says that competitive dog treats are often just flour and water without any nutritional value. Even cookies marked 'no preservatives' often sit in large store bins for long periods of time, exposed to air, he says. That indicates to him that there is nothing in them nutritionally to go bad.
"My view on competition is that it's a good thing," he says. "We are separating ourselves from the others. We have a small niche market, and we haven't even contacted vegetarians yet."
"A carrot is worth its weight in gold" was Hatherly's motto for Lucky Penny, and it now appears on the back of Henry & Sons business cards. "Making cookies, Making friends" is the new motto on all the company's packaging and on its website, www.henryandsons.com.
Jana Seshadri contributed to this story.
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
