Name: Kelly and Paul Evans

Business: Duffy’s Diner

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 5.30pm, and Saturday 9am to 1.30pm.

When did you open and why?

We started the business from home two years ago in February 2018 with freezers in the garage.

We had our own pet dog and we were struggling to source good quality raw brand locally and for a reasonable price. It was a lot of money to be shipped to our house.

So I decided to get a freezer and buy enough stock to see to our own dog and a few friends' dogs.

Then friends told other friends and then word got out and we ended with eight freezers in our garage.

Then we decided actually we need to take this thing seriously now and we opened up the unit.

Why in this location?

Oswestry for starters because it’s a border market town with a huge amount of working dogs that like to be raw fed, so it’s a prime location.

We were down on the smaller estate to start with, which was a unit around a third of this size.

We were running this alongside our day-to-day jobs, so we were in a smaller unit and this one became available so we decided to move here, and it means we can grow the business better.

Tell us about your business?

We don’t get any unusual customers, we can accommodate anyone. Everything we sell is species appropriate.

Raw has got a lot of bad press, but it was what people used to feed their pets. Back when kibble [dry compound feed] was designed they didn’t have big freezers to store fresh meat.

So now what we have got are these meals that are all tailor made, all balanced to the right ratios. There’s not a lot of overthinking people need to do, it’s already done for them. A lot of them have got extra things added to them. We’ve also got the ingredients if people want to build their own meals for the dogs.

People tend to be very, very well educated about nutrition for their pets. At the end of the day, we as humans are not encouraged to eat an unbalanced diet and an animal that we love is the same.

We’ve got dogs, cats, ferrets, birds of prey, snakes, all sorts of pet owners purchase produce from this shop.

What is your proudest moment in business?

We only have to read back through our reviews on Google and on our Facebook page to see how we are doing and how far we’ve come.

There isn’t anything negative on there, everyone’s been really, really positive, from the transitions their pets have had, from the advice that they’ve had and the results that they have seen. It just tends to be a happier, healthier pet.

Any strange requests?

Sometimes you do get asked for the odd strange organ. We might have been asked if we sell testicles.

We do get asked for things like that, but that is usually someone who has been feeding for a long time.