Pick up a bag of dog food in any UK supermarket and the front of the pack tells you a lovely, simple story. All-natural chicken. Real beef. Wholesome ingredients. Then turn it over.
Twenty per cent chicken, if you're lucky. Then come the fillers. Rice flour, potato starch, d extrose, and sometimes, somehow, colourings. Food for an animal that, two generations ago, would have been eating off-cuts and bones from the family table is now full of fillers, slurry, and ingredients that exist for one reason only: to make the bag cheaper to produce while keeping the front of the pack looking premium.
The conversation on ultra-processed foods' impact on humans is growing day by day, but that same conversation for dog food is a long way behind. Yet, the impacts are showing up anyway, in the form of rising allergies and chronic conditions in pets that havent been seen at this scale before.
Scrumpf, founded by UK founder Joy Timmer, is the answer to all of that. A freeze-dried raw dog food brand built around real ingredients, transparent labelling, and the radical idea that what's on the front of the pack should match what's on the back.
What is Scrumpf?
Scrumpf is a UK dog nutrition brand that makes freeze-dried raw food, single-protein treats, and natural supplements.
The whole range is built on the same idea: every ingredient earns its place. No fillers, no binders, no derivatives, no preservatives, no added sugars. Human-grade ingredients only, novel proteins to dodge the chicken and beef allergies that have become endemic in the category, and a labelling discipline where what's on the front of the pack matches what's on the back.
It's built for dog owners who want to feed their dog the way they're starting to feed themselves. Whole ingredients, no fillers, no nonsense.
The initial range focused on Scrumpf Freeze-Dried Duck (a complete meal), guinea fowl and trout treats, and three powdered supplements: joint care, digestion, and the calming blend that's quietly become Scrumpf's bestseller. But soon, Joy is launching new flavours and products, with more novel proteins like Pheasant, Wild Boar & Venison. She’s even launching a Venison Terrine, as the perfect topper for their dried food.
How does Scrumpf work?
Scrumpfs products focus on a complete-meal range, built to be the dog's whole diet. Protein, bone, a little fruit and veg, and the right vitamin and mineral profile to match.
That means, you don't need to add anything else. For larger dogs, where freeze-dried can be expensive to feed exclusively, Joy is happy for owners to use it as a topper alongside another food. Even a small amount of raw, she argues, is worth doing.
The food is freeze-dried, which means the raw ingredients have been preserved by removing the moisture rather than cooked at high temperatures. The result is shelf-stable for two years without a single preservative, and nutritionally close to a raw diet without the freezer-storage hassle.
The supplements are powders, not chews. That's deliberate. The chew format requires fillers and binders to hold the supplement together: vegetable oils, dextrose, the same nonsense Scrumpf is built to avoid. Powders sit on top of the food and skip all of it.
Joint care is the one Joy will tell you every dog over a year old should be on, on the basis that joint damage is something you prevent rather than something you fix in old age.
The calming blend, made with brewer's yeast, hemp, lemon balm, peppermint, valerian root and St John's Wort, has built a steady subscription business off owners of anxious dogs, fireworks-averse dogs, and at busy times of the year, dogs trying to cope with a house full of guests.
Meet the founder: Joy
Joy fell into the dog food industry by accident and ended up loving it, but the more time she spent in it the more she grew increasingly uncomfortable with the gap between how dog food is marketed and what's actually in it. The misleading labelling, the filler ingredients, the protein sourcing standards. She knew where the numbers came from. She knew the regulations. She knew what good looked like.
Then last year she got a puppy. She wanted to feed her freeze-dried raw, the format she already knew was nutritionally superior. So she went looking. And what was available in the UK was, to her eyes, not good enough. "I set out to create the best freeze-dried raw food," she says. Scrumpf was the answer.
The thing she'll spend an hour on, if you let her, is the relationship between vets and the big pet food brands. Veterinary degrees, she'll point out, dedicate roughly two weeks to canine nutrition.
Unfortunately, the independent research papers that underpin that fortnight of education are often funded by the brands that can afford to commission them, like Royal Canin, Hill's, and a few others. Which causes the recommendations vets makes to often be very skewed towards what they’ve learnt about canine nutrition.
That said, Joy is not anti-vet, in fact she loves them. She's anti the commercial structure that has made the leading recommended dog food a bag whose first ingredient is rice flour.
Why we love Scrumpf
The dog food category has been getting away with murder for years. Ultra-processed ingredients hidden behind premium-feeling branding, marketing claims that don't survive a flip of the pack, and a regulatory regime that allows "meat and animal derivatives" on a label to mean almost anything. Around 30% of dogs have a chicken allergy, and "meat and animal derivatives" is how a chicken-allergic dog ends up eating chicken without anyone knowing. The customers paying for it are dog owners who actually love their dogs and assume the brand is telling them the truth.
Scrumpf is a small brand making the case that it doesn't have to be that way. The product is the argument. Single proteins, named on the pack. Human-grade ingredients. No filler. Powdered supplements because the chew format requires the very ingredients Joy is trying to keep out. It's the consistency that gets us. Every decision in the range is the same decision applied differently.
We also love that it's built by an insider. Scrumpf isn't a wellness founder discovering dog nutrition from the outside. It's a founder who watched the industry from the inside, knew exactly where the problems were, and decided to do something about them.
We'll be watching.
We sat down with Joy to learn more about Scrumpf and how she's giving the UK dog food category the honest reinvention it's needed for years. You can listen to the full conversation on The Discovery Call podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts below.
🎧 Listen to the episode here