Hi, my name is Martina and I am passionate about dogs. I remember my first dog, a Cockapoo named Winnie. She was the runt of the litter and so tiny that I just wanted to love and protect her. To me this included feeding her the best nutrition that there is.

After trying several types of commercial kibble and canned dog food, I thought it just didn’t look nutritious, or tasty. I still remember the horrible smell of each can of dog food I opened.

With kibble, I wondered, “Where’s the chicken? How can a tiny hard round piece of dryness have any real nutrition?”. I couldn’t recognize many of the ingredients and questioned how long it had been sitting on the shelf. I knew this wasn’t how I wanted to feed my dog!

Being a passionate pet owner, I started doing a lot of research and found shocking, startling information about the commercial pet food industry. I knew that I didn’t want to continue feeding my Winnie commercial dog foods and said goodbye to them.

Since then, for more than 2 decades, I’ve been preparing and feeding my dogs only home-made meals, made fresh with locally sourced ingredients. I have seen the benefits of a natural, wholesome doggie diet with all of my dogs. My pets never got sick and had long healthy lives.

After many years of taking courses and researching pet nutrition, an inspiring moment in the kitchen turned my dream into a reality, with the birth of The Healthy Barker. I felt I had to make my dog food accessible to other loving pet owners. To do this, I reached out to veterinarians to get their approval of my food and found a wonderful and reputable pet nutritionist that I consult with for all my recipes, to ensure that they are complete and balanced.