How to resolve AdBlock issue? Wagalot makes sure foods don’t go to waste … and dogs' tails wag a lot more
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
WHAT CAN WE DO with fruit, vegetable, meat and fish scraps? Do they all go into the bin?
Wagalot Brands has its solution. This innovative company turns surplus produce from Melbourne’s Prahran Market (meat, fish and veges) into dog treats and meal toppers – helping to reduce the 7.6 million tonnes of Australian food waste produced each year.
Wagalot Brands has partnered with food waste outfit Eco Guardians to dehydrate the surplus on site.
Alice Needham, the co-founder and director of Wagalot said the work that has gone into the company, and the implications of its offerings, “are massive”. 
She said the company started 16 years ago, it’s moved to bigger premises a few times and now pretty much supplies Australia wide.
Circular eco-economy goals
Wagalot’s latest product is DoGood which Ms Needham said provided a “circular-eco set-up”.
“We take repurposed left over food from Prahran market, anything that they’re not selling at the end of the day, and that goes for any fruit, vegetables, there’s a lot of fish off-cuts, there’s meat,” Ms Needham told Talking Business.
“These all get dehydrated overnight on the site, then slowly brought down to the right temperatures.
“It’s dehydrated down to a product we call a market mix and then that gets added to other products in Wagalot and we turn it into meal toppers, cookies, blends that you can add in,” she said.
“If you’re making dinners, you can make your dog meat balls, meat loaf, hamburgers, all sorts of things. We’ve got an entire cookbook for what you can do with DoGood.”
Dog food or dog dining?
The company also produces doggy birthday-cake kits and now operates from its third up-sized Carrum Downs factory, supplying around 600 pet retailers across Australia and New Zealand.
Ms Needham said the vet-endorsed products are environmentally friendly because it’s stopping so much stuff going into landfill, which created emissions.
“This way we rescue it before it ends up in landfill, we convert it into a realty usable product that we can give to vets,” she said.
“It has amazing proteins – Omega 3, Omega 6, all these vitamins in it that our dogs need.”
All of Wagalot’s products are sold at low prices. A shaker or meal topper costs about $7-$8, a bag of cookies is $15-$16.
She said the dogs love it
“If you’ve ever used blood and bone and you put that underneath all your wonderful plants and your vegies and they (the dogs) go and dig up everything you’ve done, that’s how much they love it,” she said. 
More ‘goodness’ for dogs
Ms Needham said as part of the full circle, 50% of the firm’s products go to dog rescues as well as planting and conservation works.
“It’s there to do good. That’s the whole basis of the product,” she said.
Wagalot’s working to its ethos of “doing good for the planet, for the dog, for rescues and charities and the environment”.
“We feel it’s very circular,” Ms Needham said.
“It’s ticking so many different boxes and hopefully solving some problems along the way and as we can scale up and find more places to use the product and more markets that jump in on board with Eco-Guardians, then we can help in solving some of those problems.” 
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
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