Atlanta, GA
It started with a cat.
Why this food has no synthetic vitamins in it, and why it is weighed to the gram.
Willie Herman is one person cooking food for dogs in a home kitchen in Atlanta, Georgia, in batches small enough to carry to the door. That is the whole company. There is no plant, no co-packer, no warehouse, and nothing frozen for one.
How it started
Dwight lived in China from 2008 to 2020. In November 2012, homesick and four years into a stretch without a pet, he bought a Siamese kitten from a shop window and named him Milton. Milton was an indoor cat his whole life. He never went outside once.
Before he turned four, Milton stopped eating and lost weight. The first vet drew blood and said he was sorry. A second opinion only prolonged it. It was cancer.
He had been eating imported premium kibble, about a hundred dollars a bag, chosen specifically because Dwight did not trust the local food supply. Buying it was the whole precaution.
The question that eventually became this company was a plain one: how does a young indoor cat who has never been outside get cancer? Answering it took an online nutrition course and several years of reading, and part of the answer was this — the imported food was built around a synthetic vitamin premix, and the synthetic vitamins in pet food are largely manufactured in the same country he was importing the food to get away from. The label was accurate about the meat and the bag. It said nothing useful about the vitamin pack inside.
The food bought to keep him out of that supply chain was carrying it.
That is why there is no synthetic vitamin premix in this food, and why there will not be one.
Why it is exact
The other half of those years was tea. In Jilin, for three or four solid years, Dwight read everything he could find about aged pu’er — in a language not his own, in a city not his own, with no professional reason to.
There was a man he drank with regularly who had the best pour in the market district. It was his job, and it had been his job for years; he had made that tea thousands of times and could have eyeballed the leaf and been right every time.
He weighed it anyway. Every pour. Not for the customer, who would never have known the difference, and not for himself, who had long since stopped needing to. He weighed it because that is what the thing requires.
Doing it correctly when nobody would catch you is the whole definition of a standard. Willie Herman’s recipes are written in grams for that reason and no other.
The present
Rigger is a Pudelpointer, a German versatile hunting breed, and he came home as part of a list of things those years abroad had not allowed. He holds two posts here: Quality Control Officer, for batch approval, and Chief Vibes Officer, for everything else about the kitchen.
The name on the label is older than either of them. The company is named for Dwight’s maternal grandfather, Willie Wilson, and for Herman — a family dog who used to share his grandmother’s morning coffee.
Why it is filed
Selling food for animals in Georgia is a regulated act. Our ingredients and labels are in review with the Georgia Department of Agriculture. Nothing is delivered until the state clears the label and the registration is issued. The ingredient panels on this site are the panels submitted for that review — in order by weight, with nothing left off and nothing added for the website. If an ingredient is not on the label, it does not go in the food, and it does not appear in a photograph next to it.
The food is made for supplemental feeding. It contains no synthetic vitamin premix.
The other half
Reading the rules turned out to be most of the work, and most of it is not written down anywhere a normal person would find it. WHNN is where that reading gets published — recalls, ingredient standards, the parts of the regulatory system that decide what is allowed in a bowl. It is published by Willie Herman LLC and it does not review other people's food.
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