My £200 dog food start-up now turns over £1.6m per year - and I owe it all to my rescue pooch

• Barbara Hanly launched her healthy dog treat company from her family kitchen in 2015
• The 46-year-old was struggling to make ends meet before launching her business
• Started with just £200, it now turns over £1.6 million per year and has expanded to the US
• Barbara says was “saved” by her beloved rescue pooch Lily, who became the company’s chief taste tester

When Barbara Hanly met Lily - a tiny, resilient Jack Russell-Chihuahua mix rescue dog - she had no idea how big an impact the little pup would have on her life.

After nearing burnout from eight years working in the sales team of a corporate company, the 46-year-old was feeling lost and exhausted before her four-legged friend entered her life and changed everything.

“I was severely burnt out,” she said. “In sales, it’s all targets. But I'm a nurturer. I don’t like being on a sales floor, manipulating people, selling. I did it for so long I completely lost myself. So when I left that, I kind of went into a void. I had to ask myself, ‘Who am I?’”

It was then that Lily literally landed in Barbara’s lap. She was visiting a friend who rescues stray dogs when the then-six-month-old puppy jumped up and looked into her eyes.

“She looked at me, and I was like, ‘Right, you're coming home with me’,” Barbara recalls. “I wasn't looking for an animal, because I had just started a business. I had no money, and I was living with my parents. But she was so tiny. She was very underweight, and she wasn't affectionate at all when I first met her.

“She had clearly come from a bad background. It took a long time, but eventually, after six months, she would play and cuddle and was stuck to my side completely.”

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Barbara’s business at the time was a dog grooming service, but she struggled to make ends meet.

“That was a career disaster, really,” she laughs. “I love animals, and you kind of have to stress dogs out when they're getting groomed. They don't always like getting their hair pulled or having a bath. It would take me literally half a day to groom one dog.

“But they were so relaxed by the end of it and would fall asleep on the grooming table. I used to have a long waiting list because people were like, ‘Oh my God, my dog just loves going to you and getting groomed.’ But I couldn't make any money out of it.”

It was while heaving dogs up and down from the grooming table that Barbara realised there was an obesity problem in the animal world. She found smaller dogs were severely overweight and some of her four-legged clients had even been prescribed insulin because they had developed doggy diabetes.

Realising that dog treats were a major problem when it came to animal health, Barbara saw an opportunity to create a new business that could help her favourite animals.

“When you look at commercial dog treats, they are as bad as human junk food. Many mass-produced Dental sticks for dogs, for example, use preservatives, salt, sugars and other hidden additives. There's nothing nutritional in them. That's when the idea came.”

In 2015, with just £200, Dublin-based Barbara began her business, Soopa – a plant-based dog treat company that sells natural chews, healthy bites, dental sticks and more. The company began in the family kitchen, with Barbara buying up a number of commercial dehydrators and a range of fruit and vegetable ingredients including bananas, apples, and sweet potatoes.

She air-dried the ingredients and then fed them to Lily and her dad’s dog Jackson, a Cairn Terrier – who became chief food testers.

“It had to get their approval,” Barbara said. “They had the final sign-off. If they didn't like it, it wasn’t going to market.

“I was experimenting to see what fruits and vegetables dogs would love and understand what they really, really wanted. They know themselves what is good for their system and what their body needs. They're very intuitive. And things built from there.”

After initially selling the treats at local markets, word quickly spread via social media and soon pet shops were sending in orders to stock the products. Since then, Soopa has evolved into a business success that turns over £1.6 million per year, with fulfilment now taking place in huge warehouses and products selling to customers and stores in the UK, Europe and the USA – with plans to expand into the Japanese market in motion.

And, Barbara reveals, the snacks – which include the best-selling Carrot & Pumpkin Sticks – are very tasty, as her team can verify.

“We only use human-grade ingredients,” she says. “We just had a meeting with a potential Japanese distributor, and my senior sales administrator ate some banana pumpkin on the video call to demonstrate how delicious they are.

“We recently launched a ‘cozy collection’ for autumn and winter with gingerbread biscuit and spice pumpkin latte flavours. They said it was torture in the factory because the smells from the products had everyone drooling.”

While Soopa treats are made for canine friends, Barbara is passionate about creating delicious combinations that humans can relate to.

“Our mantra is always to create recipes that are truly delicious combinations,” Barbara added. “If it’s good enough for us, it’s good enough for our dogs.”

Barbara, who recently rescued another stray dog named Hammie, was left devastated when Lily passed away in 2022 but cherishes the memories of the time they had together.

She also fully appreciates the hand, or rather paw, that Lily had in the creation of her business.” Lily came into my life at such a significant time. She was named Lily because my friend who rescued her saw her smelling lilies.

“My grandmother was called Lily, so I really do believe that my grandmother sent her to me. She gave me a sense of family and she gave so much pure love. She was fearless. She would chase after a horse or a cow or a Rottweiler. She had no idea of her size. She definitely saved me after burnout and was the inspiration for everything.”