The dog who started all of this was a 65-pound Golden Retriever with a jaw like a vice grip and zero patience for anything that called itself a "long-lasting chew." Rawhide was off the table. Dental chews lasted about as long as a TV commercial. Antlers were expensive and gone by Thursday. Every chew that was good for dogs lasted minutes. Every chew that lasted was questionable. It felt like an unsolvable problem.

The answer came from 14,000 feet up in the Himalayan mountains, where yak herders had been making chhurpi, a hard fermented cheese, for centuries. Four ingredients: yak milk, lime juice, salt, and time. Real time. Days of pressing and smoking and drying until the result is something almost impossibly dense. The herders gave it to their dogs. Their dogs chewed it for hours. Nobody was crossing their fingers about the ingredients because there were four of them and everyone knew what they were.

We tracked down small family farms in Nepal that still follow the traditional process. We brought that same three-ingredient recipe to the US market without changing a thing, because there was nothing to change. Then we added a small range of infused flavors. But the original is still the original, still made the same way, still doing what it has always done.