Bestie Kitchen has made a name for itself creating healthy and natural food supplements for dogs and cats through its brands Bestie Health and Planet A Pet Food.
For founder Amanda Falconer, the secret lies in the ingredients and how they are sourced in a sustainable manner. “Planet A products combine upcycled veg and insect protein with a restaurant-grade plant protein that mimics the taste and texture of meat when rehydrated,” Amanda explains. “Black soldier fly larva is a key part of this process. The black soldier fly larva has a voracious appetite, and can turn organic waste into valuable biomass very fast, with a low impact on resources: one tonne of insects can be grown in seven days using a land area of only 5sqm. Because the mature black soldier fly doesn’t eat, it is very efficient at storing nutrients as a larva. And the nutrient profile – amino acids, fatty acids etc – is awesomely good for our purposes at Planet A.”
The inspiration for the Planet A brand came after Amanda watched a documentary about reducing individual and collective carbon emissions. “I already knew human and pet food have a big environmental impact,” she says. “I became vegan myself and began researching what a healthy meat-free diet could look like for dogs and cats.” Amanda built upon the experience she had with the Bestie brand, leveraging the brand’s expertise in cold extrusion chews with Planet A‘s unique nutritional formulation.
A winning history
The company has come a long way since it was launched in 2019, creating supplements for raw feeders. Now, it has developed a cold extrusion processing method for its product range, which is an Australian first, and has its own manufacturing facility in Newcastle. These milestones and successes would not have been possible without the help of the grants the company has received over the years. Amanda made a roadmap of sorts of the grants that could be available to the business early on in her journey with Bestie Kitchen. She made a point of always moving forward, even if she was unsuccessful in a grant application, while keeping an eye on other opportunities on the horizon. “Knowing what’s out there and when it may match your business in its growth cycle is useful,” she shares.
Amanda first applied for the CSIRO Kick-Start program and her pitch got the attention of the selection committee. She made it as far as stage 1 and this helped her get the Food Innovation Australia (FIAL) grant. “By then, we had formulations and a method but I needed equipment,” she says. She was then successful in securing another grant, from the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC).
Unfortunately, Amanda now had another problem – these grants required matching capital, something that she did not have at that time. “Marketing languished a little,” she recalls. “Until the Boosting Female Founder grant that is, which we were awarded earlier in the year.”
Bestie Kitchen was among the 34 businesses chosen to receive Business.gov.au’s Female Founders grant, receiving $249,600 of the $11.6 million total in grants awarded for their cohort. Bestie Kitchen used the grant to scale its range of pet supplements and sustainable pet foods. It took a couple of failed attempts before the business got the coveted grant on its third try.
“Looking back on our first application, it was very under-done. I made that application soon after we’d started the business, so everything was a bit airy-fairy forecast-wise,” Amanda admits. “Second time around, we got through the first stage but there was a change of government that led to a review and the program was put on hold for a while, and by the time I was invited to apply in round two, a number of things had changed.”
Secrets to landing grants
Amanda says the primary reason for her focus on obtaining grants was to help augment Bestie Kitchen’s marketing efforts. “We aren’t a company that’s gone and pitched to investors, and given that I have bootstrapped with government funds so far, we were finding it hard to give the brands the marketing love they needed without more capital,” she explains. She’s also used the funding for investments in IP, such as formulations, processes and branding, as well as for equipment and the manufacturing facility.
Amanda has gained much insight about the grant process that she believes other businesses should take to heart. For one, while there are some grant programs that are open for businesses that fall into the ‘I’ve got an idea but haven’t really got much traction’ category, it is better for start-ups to be able to show they have achieved some level of growth in terms of revenue, customers, users, etc. for grant-giving organisations to take notice.
Amanda also says it is important for grant applicants to find out what a particular grant program is trying to achieve and if the business can be a fit for the grant’s goals. “Most programs aren’t one-off and they have staff working on them,” she explains. “For those programs and people to continue, they need success stories. What does success look like for them?”
She adds that businesses should strive to stand out among other applicants to be noticed. “You’ll need to show why your business is in business; what makes it different/better etc than competitors. Take that as a given,” she says.
Businesses also need to present their case as to how committed they are to delivering the results expected of them as grant recipients and how well their business is aligned with the grant’s objectives. “You’ll need to show things such as why you need it, what the business would be like without it, and what will be achieved with it,” Amanda explains. “The key is to make sure you have a solid argument for all the criteria. And some application processes are more detailed than others so if you aren’t prepared to really do the work, don’t waste your time doing a half-baked job.”
Finally, Amanda advises small-business owners who plan to apply for a grant to seek help. “Get someone ruthless but invested (not necessarily financially) to read through it and play devil’s advocate,” she says. “If you haven’t got someone who can act in that role, consider a grant-writing agency.”
But what if the grant application is unsuccessful? Amanda advises unsuccessful grant applicants to ask for feedback as to why their application was rejected. “Sometimes that feedback is just generic, which is not that helpful; however, sometimes you find gems,” she says. “This was the case with my first unsuccessful Jobs for NSW MVP grant. The feedback was constructive and specific, and it gave me a good insight into where assessors were sceptical or had objections. We addressed that feedback and made sure to get in front of those objections in our second application and were successful, and were also able to take those learnings across to applications for other grants.”
This article first appeared in issue 45 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
