Rockford dog treat maker to celebrate 60 years in business

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — For almost six decades, a Rockford business has been making dogs happy one tasty treat at a time.

Rick Ruffolo is President and CEO of Phelps Pet Products in Rockford. He’s been with the company for eight years.

“It’s been great,” he said. “Here in Rockford, we have more than tripled in size over the last eight years.”

The company makes jerky treats out of meat and plants for dogs. Ruffolo shows us how they make their treats.

“What we’re seeing here is the frozen meats first go from a 40 to 50 pound block through what we call a rotoclaw and broken into smaller chunks that make it easier when we add them to the bowl chopper to chop them up in a nice even smooth fashion,” he showed.

“And then we add the liquid ingredients, along with the dry sifted ingredients, to create the ultimate recipe,” he said.

“Once the recipe has been properly mixed, it’s put into what we call our tub buggies, they’re metal stainless steel buggies carts that we can move around the room, and then it’ll go into our extruder, which I can show you next,” he explained.

“With the recipe, they take the mix that all exactly the way we want it now, and it’s going to be lifted up and put into this funnel that you see there. That’s called a Vemag extruder. And what’s happening, just like with play dough as a kid, it’s going to get pushed through the pipe and then out the other side into whatever shape we want it to be,” he demonstrated.

Phelps makes anywhere from 40 to 50 800-pound batches of jerky meat a day in one of their three processing rooms alone.

Next is oven time.

“The ovens will cook the product anywhere from, depends on the recipe, anywhere from 8, even up to 14 hours,” Ruffolo said.

There are 23 ovens in the company. That’s a lot of meat cooking at once. Ruffolo says quality is key. They have a team dedicated to making sure the product is safe for man’s best friend.

John Grogan leads the quality team at Phelps.

“We check that product, make sure it’s viable,” he said.

He checks to see if the meat is cooking at a hot enough temperature to kill off any of what Ruffolo calls the “bad stuff.” They also check moisture to cut out any possibility of mold developing.

“Very important,” Grogan said. “That’s why we do a triple check. We check at the ovens, we check at the pellet stage, then we check at the packaging stage so everything gets caught and so that we have the best product here at Phelps.”

“Now that the product is cooked and approved by quality, we have our folks here now taking all of those meat strips and putting them into what we call wip bins or bins that allow us to move the product around to the next step,” Ruffolo said. “It’s both an art and a science, to be honest. We have a lot of artisans that really know how to create great product.”

The next step is cutting the jerky.

“Sometimes it’s cut by hand,” Ruffolo said. “Other times we’ll have machines that will cut it.”

The cut meat goes up a conveyor belt to a machine that weighs the product before bagging it. Then it’s off to packaging, which is a process Ruffolo finds neat.

“We can do a pre-made pouch, or we also can use roll stock,” he said. “For me, roll stock is pretty cool to watch because you’re literally taking a big roll of film, and it’s creating a bag.”

Next the treats are bagged, boxed, wrapped on pallets, then moved to shipping to go off to the customer.

Ruffolo said there is so much pride in what they do, and how they innovate in partnership with the brands they work with to make everyone happy.

“When you give your dog a treat, that moment is that special time when you’re bonding with your dog every day,” he said. “To have the opportunity to provide a mechanism, right, the treats to allow those moments to happen, it’s pretty cool.”