This article was published in the January/February 2025 issue of Pet Food Processing. Read it and other articles from this issue in our January/February digital edition.
Muenster Milling is not a new name in the pet food industry. In fact, the company has been owned and operated by the Felderhoff family since 1932. The family business started out as a flour milling company in Muenster, Texas, and later converted to a producer of livestock feed. In 1989, the business pivoted once again, when the third generation of the Felderhoff family added an extruder to its production equipment, and Muenster Milling’s pet food business was born.
After fourth generation Felderhoffs — brothers Mitch and Chad — joined the ranks in 2007 and 2013, respectively, the company furthered its pet food evolution with the addition of a 17,000-square-foot freeze-dry processing plant in Muenster in 2018.
With a growing demand throughout the industry for more freeze-dried pet food and a fragmented supply chain to service the space, the Felderhoffs had dreams of expanding the company’s freeze-drying capabilities beyond what they could offer out of the Muenster, Texas, facility. The quest to fulfill this dream led the family to pursue additional capital resulting in the eventual acquisition by Kainos Capital in August 2021.
“The Felderhoffs built an incredible pet food company over four generations…and they scaled their business from what started out as a kibble business into the freeze dry arena,” said Jim Holdrieth, president and chief executive officer of Muenster Milling. “But like many family-owned businesses, they lacked the capital to fully address the opportunity to become a leading manufacturer of freeze-dried pet food in the industry.
“Kainos came in to provide the capital to take the business to the next level,” Holdrieth explained. “First and foremost, they provided the funds to build a vertically integrated, highly automated, low-cost facility that we now operate out of Denton, Texas.”
While many freeze-dried pet food facilities use manual labor to load trays into freeze drying carts, Muenster has incorporated labor-saving automation to this part of the process.
|Soon after the acquisition was inked, Muenster was able to pursue the build of its new freeze-drying facility. After a number of site considerations, the operations team chose a 65,000-square-foot open warehouse in Denton. As an empty shell, the company was able to design the facility essentially from a blank slate, which allowed for state-of-the-art equipment throughout and plenty of automation. The $47 million plant became fully operational at the end of 2023.
Historically, at the company’s original freeze dry facility, meat was pre-blended, formed and flash frozen by third-party facilities before coming to Muenster for freeze drying and packaging. In Denton, the company’s entire freeze-drying operation is now done under one roof. Vertical integration, from ingredient procurement, meat processing and freeze drying all the way to packaging, is providing the company with the necessary tools to become a major player in the freeze-dried pet food market.
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Best in class
Alongside Kainos Capital’s investment into Muenster’s growing freeze-dried pet food business came an expansion of the company’s leadership team, starting with the addition of Holdrieth as president and CEO in late 2023. As a veteran food ingredient executive, most recently serving as CEO of Florida Food Products (FFP), Holdrieth brought to Muenster more than 30 years of manufacturing experience.
“I’m the first person without the last name of Felderhoff to run this company, so I wanted to make sure Chad and Mitch were comfortable with the direction I had for Muenster Milling,” Holdrieth said.
With a new facility up and running and a goal of becoming a market leader in freeze-dried, Holdrieth quickly realized he needed a leadership team capable of getting the job done.
“We were extremely lean from a human capital perspective when I arrived. In looking at where we were versus what we were trying to accomplish, we simply didn’t have the muscle to execute against the complexity that is inherent in freeze-dried pet food,” he said. “We had a state-of-the-art facility which had to be paired with best-in-class people and processes to enable us to deliver the highest quality pet food in the freeze dry industry. So, I started building a management team that could deliver just that. I firmly believe that if you get the people right, you’ll get the business right — and we’ve done that with our executive leadership team.”
After taking charge of the development of the new facility, from site design to equipment selection, Chad Felderhoff was well suited to take on the role of executive vice president of operations. He helps plant manager Andre Watkins manage the Denton facility and oversee operations at the legacy plant in Muenster.
The multi-head scale bucket measures the amount of product and dumps it into individual packages below.
|Other new additions included Matt Donnell as chief financial officer, Richard Eaken as director of quality, Luis Caldera as head of supply chain and Angela Mizerek as director of human resources. While the aforementioned members of the management team brought in years of experience from the human food side to their new roles, Dave DeLorenzo, executive vice president of sales and commercialization, and Ryan James, chief revenue officer, are leveraging decades of pet food industry expertise in their new positions.
Alongside the management team, close to 50 employees work at the Denton facility — around 20 work on the office side, the remainder operate the plant.
Supply and demand
Muenster’s mission is “to be the preferred partner — formulator and contract manufacturer — for the leading freeze-dried product brands and retailers,” according to Holdrieth. While the company does sell some product under its Muenster label, the majority of the plant’s production (around 90%) goes toward private label or co-manufacture customers.
“We have a KPI (key performance indicator) that all of our employees own, OTIF — on-time, and in full — which is our measurement of how often we keep our promise to our customers,” Holdrieth said. “I’m thrilled to say that we are now operating in the 95th percentile, which is industry leading. Our customers can count on us.”
“Automation often gets a bad name. It actually makes the work more efficient and makes employees better at their jobs.” Chad Felderhoff, Muenster Milling
DeLorenzo added, “The overall market for freeze-dried pet food is strong — it’s currently around a billion-dollar market. The pet specialty channel is currently the most developed channel, but there’s a lot of opportunity in the food, drug, mass and club channel — that’s where we’re seeing the most growth.
“Now that we have the capacity, we can reach out to larger customers,” he said.
While freeze-dried pet food still only makes up a small percentage of pet food sales, Holdrieth was quick to point out that the market will quickly change when larger brands start offering freeze-dried pet food. Additionally, there has been a lot of interest in kibble plus technology, which allows a brand to blend in a percentage of freeze-dried meat with kibble, thus keeping the price point a bit lower while delivering a more nutritious pet food for pet parents. Holdrieth predicts the market will continue to grow and change.
“We’re seeing continuous growth in freeze-dried…and, when we see one of the big brands come out with a freeze-dried product, then the race will be on,” Felderhoff said. “What we tried to do with the facility was to prepare for that race — when the big guys get there, we’ll already be in it.”
After freeze-drying, product is stored in a freezer until it's time to be conveyed into the packaging area.
|The original six freeze driers in Muenster plus 15 new freeze dryers at the Denton plant — and the space for 10 more — is exactly what Muenster needed to handle the growth of existing customers and the addition of new ones.
“While we don’t anticipate the need to add additional dryers in the near term, we are prepared to quickly add additional capacity as new brands come into the market,” Holdrieth said. “We built this plant to service the needs of our customers in this fast growing, dynamic space.”
Muenster not only has the ability to produce single-ingredient, freeze-dried foods and treats — in nugget, meatball and patty formats — but it also produces complete-and-balanced, freeze-dried meals with vegetable inclusions and meat and seafood proteins. And thanks to the company’s kibble plant in Muenster, there also exists the capability to offer kibble-plus products to new and existing customers. These offerings, which are blended on site in Denton, combine traditional kibble with some freeze-dried inclusions
Each freeze dryer can hold 10 carts full of 42 trays of product to be freeze dried in a 12- to 18-hour cycle.
|Some pet parents aren’t ready or financially able to make the switch to a more premium, freeze-dried pet food diet, so kibble-plus/hybrid options offer a lower-priced entry point into raw nutrition. In other cases, thanks to tighter budgets, some pet parents are having to “trade down” when it comes to their pet food purchases, which means replacing an all-freeze-dried diet with a hybrid one.
“In today’s economy we’ve seen pet parents having to trade down when feeding their pets, going back into kibble,” Holdrieth said. “They’re paying more for gas and more on eggs and more on milk, and something’s got to give. We want to offer them high nutrition, real food, and our kibble-plus options fit perfectly there.”
The company’s in-house R&D team helps formulate recipes for new and existing customers. Benchtop equipment allows the nutritionists to develop prototypes and test new formulations before they are produced on a larger scale.
“Some customers come to us with their own product recipe. Other times we do the full formulation, or we take their recipe and tweak it a bit,” Holdrieth said. “We have a rigorous commercialization process.”
“We want to be a source of ideas for our customers to add value to the products that they’re putting into the market,” DeLorenzo added.
Automation and integration
Muenster Milling’s new state-of-the-art plant in Denton, Texas, features 15 Parker Freeze Dry commercial freeze dryers.
|The mission of the new Denton freeze-drying facility was not only to have built-in capacity to handle future growth with its existing 15 freeze dryers — and room for more — but to have built-in efficiencies through its vertical production integration and automated systems. Bringing the entire production process under one roof has allowed Muenster to achieve cost savings, food safety and quality benefits.
At the front end of the facility, after receiving, is the production kitchen where 40- to 60-lb blocks of frozen protein are ground and blended with additional ingredients — vegetables, premix vitamins and minerals. Many of the complete-and-balanced formulations contain multiple proteins and a variety of additional ingredients in order to reach the desired nutritional value. After mixing, the product is then formed into pellets, nuggets, meatballs or patties, flash frozen and then stored in the blast freezer until freeze-drying.
Next, product is transferred onto trays and auto-loaded into freeze drying carts — 42 trays per cart. In many freeze-drying plants, loading the carts is a manual process — Muenster invested in automatic loaders to streamline operations and reduce labor.
Ten carts are moved into any of the 15 Parker Freeze Dry dryers for the 12- to 18-hour drying cycle. The company was already familiar with Parker dryers after using them in its Muenster operation.
“We went with the next generation of energy efficient Parker because we already knew how to operate them. And, there was a lead-time factor,” Felderhoff said. “At the time we were equipping the plant, there was an 18-month lead time for freeze dryers — the Parker systems only needed a 6-month lead time.”
The freeze-drying cycles, which can be monitored by the plant manager and production supervisors in the operations room, are automatically set based on proprietary programming Muenster developed and don’t require in-person surveillance.
A robotic palletizer helps load finished product, saving on the need for additional labor.
|After freeze drying, product is stored in totes or super sacks in a freezer until packaging. The totes or super sacks are loaded automatically into a hopper and conveyed into a multi-head scale bucket for automatic bag filling. The plant features two packaging lines — one for smaller sizes between 1 oz and 20 oz, and the other for larger products, 5 lbs or larger. After packaging, products are conveyed through a check weigher and X-ray before moving to a robotic case packer and palletizer.
“Automation often gets a bad name. It actually makes the work more efficient and makes employees better at their jobs,” Felderhoff said. “We’re making jobs better, easier, safer, effective and efficient.”
While one-third of the plant’s employees work in packaging, most are cross-trained to work in additional areas of the plant.
“We set up a structure to cross train operators that gave us more flexibility with the headcount,” Felderhoff said.
Cross training has not only provided flexibility but offered employees room for advancement.
“We created a pay structure that when you show competence in different areas of operation, there’s an opportunity to make more money,” Holdrieth said. “You’re more valuable to the company if you can operate in three different production areas, giving us ultimate flexibility. And, it makes people better employees because they get a better picture of the entire operation from start to finish. They understand how their handling of the product at the beginning of the process impacts that quality of the product that goes into the bag.”
“We want to be a source of ideas for our customers to add value to the products that they’re putting into the market.” Dave DeLorenzo, Muenster Milling
Employees have an opportunity to interact with management through quarterly Town Hall meetings and also have the chance to be recognized for going above and beyond through the employe of the month program appropriately named Bad to the Bone.
“We are very deliberate in the types of people we hire,” Holdrieth explained. “The equipment in our facility is great and we produce great products, but it’s the people that make the difference — I think that’s where we’ve done a fantastic job here.”
Holdrieth is proud of where the company has come in a short amount of time, which was recently capped off with SQF certification cementing Muenster as a leading supplier to the freeze dry space.
“This is not the old Muenster, it’s the new Muenster — or Muenster 2.0, if you will — combining all of the great things that the Felderhoff family had built with new capabilities, new people, and great new products for the pet food space,” Holdrieth concluded.
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