Puppy love is blossoming in isles at Waggin’ Bakery

A doggie-mommy’s special attention for her four-legged “baby” served as the origin for Waggin’ Bakery in 1997.

Yoko Shimizu “started to make doggie treats for her fat basset hound back in 1997 in Japan, but only as a hobby,” said her daughter Nanako Cabal.

“We took her recipe and changed it a little bit to fit Hawaii flavors such as pineapple,” and they tweaked the recipe a bit “so that we can sell it to the retail stores,” she said.

Creating wholesome doggie treats started as “kind of a fun thing to do, but we took it to a serious business,” said Nanako’s husband, Erick.

The treats are made for dogs, but you can eat them, too, as Mel Gibson’s character was pictured doing in “Lethal Weapon 3” when Riggs ate dog biscuits. (It is likely Gibson’s on-screen treats were made by the craft service people who worked on the movie.)

“Waggin’ Bakery starts with ingredients fit for human consumption,” explained Erick Cabal. The ingredients have names people can pronounce and complete reciting in one breath, he said.

“If you are not going to eat it, your dog should not eat it,” he said.

“All of our ingredients are from restaurant suppliers,” Cabal said. “We’re buying chicken breast, pork shoulder, the same thing” that restaurants buy.

A new product that will debut at the Made in Hawaii Festival this month is Waggin’ Bakery pork jerky, which joins chicken jerky in the product lineup.

The company buys local where possible. The peanut butter and honey cookie doggie treats use “fresh clover honey from the Big Island,” for instance.

The PB&H cookies are among some 28 different flavors of treats made by Waggin’ Bakery.

Other flavors include beef, chicken, lamb, liver, pork, taro chicken, sweet potato, bacon and cheese, cheeseburger, chicken Parmesan, coconut, mango, papaya, passion fruit and its most popular overall, pineapple.

Visitors are the primary buyers of the pineapple-flavored treats, and many are repeat buyers.

“We have some very dedicated customers … who place a regular monthly order because they came to Hawaii and they like the treat,” Cabal said.

Some stores locally carry the pineapple flavor, and they run out, so people will call to find out when Waggin’ Bakery will make its next delivery to a particular store, he said.

The people-pleasing flavor names such as bacon and cheese and chicken Parmesan generate “a lot of reaction,” he said. “Most people’s reactions are along the lines of ‘This sounds really good. Why are you giving it to the dog?’” he laughed.

Grain-free treats also are available in several flavors.

Waggin’ Bakery’s treats sell from $4 to $8.

The flavors and formulations often have been the result of experimentation to benefit their own dogs’ health issues or as a result of their dogs’ reaction to food preparation.

Who knew dogs liked papaya, for instance?

“My dogs themselves know the smell of papaya,” so when Cabal starts cutting one up, “they’re going to come flying into the room,” he said.

The business was formally established in November 2001, and after getting its feet wet at the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet and the craft fair circuit, “one family member suggested we get into the local Longs Drugs to see if they wanted to carry” the dog treats, Cabal said.

“Longs Kahala was one of our first biggest retail shops that agreed to carry our products,” Nanako said, which led to wholesale business opportunities at other stores such as ABC Stores, Don Quijote and others. The company was still hitting the craft fair circuit, as well as the Made in Hawaii Festival, with its first outing there in 2002, Erick said.

Back several years ago they were in additional retailers for a time, even including their own kiosk at Ala Moana Center, and a retail store in Waikiki.

The global economic crisis changed that, however.

“We were climbing really fast up until 2008, and everything just imploded. … The economy tanked,” Cabal said.

Despite being a premium, non-necessity product, “we’ve never been completely down and out; we’ve managed to stay alive. We’re doing OK and it’s been getting better slowly,” he said.

If any cat lover has made it this far down the column, you might wonder whether Waggin’ Bakery makes treats for felines. “We have tried in the past, but they have a really short shelf life,” Cabal said. However, “cats can eat our stuff, too. It just happens to be in a bone shape.”

“Buy Local” each Aloha Friday is about made-in-Hawaii products and the people who make them. Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.