NASHVILLE, Tenn. – NomNomNow announced the opening of a new 67,000-sq.-ft. production kitchen in Nashville to meet demand on the East Coast. The new location is seven-times larger than the company’s other processing facility in Pittsburg, California.

“We conducted a very extensive search and evaluated a half dozen different states before selecting Nashville for our second home,” said Zach Phillips, co-founder and chief operating officer, NomNomNow. “We selected Nashville because of its central location, it’s equal distance from Texas, Florida and New York. We also looked for an area that we would want to visit, one that was booming, offered us a good chance of finding qualified people as well as an available facility that met our needs.”

The new Nashville facility currently employs 30 people, but the company expects more than 100 to be employed there by the end of 2019. 

NomNomNow relies on a direct connection with consumers to determine the individual nutritional needs of the consumers’ pets. The company combines veterinary-formulated products based on customer input with an algorithm that tracks data points specific to weight, age, activity level, health related issues and other criteria to portion each meal to each pet’s unique calorie need.

“As we sign up more customers, we are leveraging the data we collect and with our algorithm we are able to constantly improve based on feedback that we get from customers,” Phillips said. “Our technical co-founder was at Google for nine years, so he lives and breathes data. We’re very excited to take the best practices of what other companies have done with data and apply that to the pet world.”

Lynn Hubbard, general manager of the Nashville facility, previously worked in human-food production as the operations manager at General Mills. He said he is excited by the level of personalization and the capacity of orders NomNomNow is able to produce with high accuracy and little waste.

“What’s really exciting is that we are currently producing product in a way that we believe is very scalable,” Hubbard said. “It definitely makes our process more complicated to manage but it also ties all of our operations much closer to the customer experience, which is really unique when you’re coming from a world of retail where you’re quite a few steps removed from the end user.”

NomNomNow’s main priority is freshness, which is why it schedules just-in-time ingredient delivery and sources from local vendors whenever possible.

“We are able to work with some of our existing suppliers but for ingredients like fresh produce we have had to find new suppliers locally to match the freshness we require,” Phillips said. “It’s an exciting process to see the impact that we’re having not only for generating jobs for our employees but also for suppliers that we work closely with.”

The expansion comes as NomNomNow grows in both size and scope. The company recently acquired $13 million in venture funding and extended its made-to-order nutrition to include cats.

According to the company, each order is home-cooked with restaurant-quality ingredients in a NomNomNow kitchen, personalized, portioned and delivered fresh to provide dogs, and now cats, with balanced diets based on individual nutritional needs. The company was founded in 2015 and is currently headquartered in Oakland, California. 

Read more about pet food manufacturers.