A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

The manager suggested putting all the supplements into a plastic bag labeled with the horses name and date to be administered. Becky, my wife, was a bio-chemistry major in college, and that didn’t sound right to her. You don’t want to put copper and iron supplements in the same container with antioxidants, as they’ll lose their potency very quickly. So she called the manufacturers and they said they wouldn’t do that either. So she came up with an idea where you take what looks very much like a strip of pudding cups, and you put each individual supplement into its own well in the strip. And you would do that in a commercial setting under good manufacturing practices. You’d do that in an industrial process in partnership with the main supplement manufacturers. You’d make the business model make sense by turning it into a continuity business where you ship this out automatically every 28 days. You’d build a stable of customers who would be happy to get their stuff on time; they’d never run out of supplements again; and they’d have total confidence that their horses would be fed correctly. Instead of having a bunch of open buckets in a hot and humid, fly-specked barn, you’d have individually sealed, portion-controlled packs that were customized to your horse with your horse’s name on it. She went out and asked a bunch of people if that was a good idea, and she got a lot of people nodding their heads and saying, “Yes.”