Annie's Pantry started with a dog who wouldn't eat. In 2018, months after her family moved back to Singapore from Sydney, Alsie Mori's Samoyed, Annie, stopped touching her food and dropped 4kg. Alsie, now a Certified Advanced Canine Nutrition Specialist, began cooking for Annie herself out of worry more than ambition. That kitchen has since become an ISO 22000-certified facility in Hyogo, Japan, feeding over 2,500 dogs across Singapore.

The Founder

Ask Alsie Mori who founded Annie's Pantry and she'll probably point at a photo of a white, fluffy dog before she points at herself. Annie was the reason any of this started. Alsie became a Certified Advanced Canine Nutrition Specialist later, in 2022, through Dogs Naturally University's Advanced Canine Nutrition Course, a canine nutrition qualification, not a veterinary board certification, but that came after years of learning by doing, not before.

Her real education started at a butcher's counter in Sydney, holding a leash, waiting her turn like everyone else.

Why Sydney, Not Singapore?

Alsie grew up in Singapore, but she was living in Sydney when she brought Annie home, a puppy from a respected Australian Samoyed breeder who'd raised the whole litter on raw food from the start. Alsie learned to feed raw the way most people learn to cook: by watching someone who already knew what she was doing, and asking questions until it made sense.

Sydney made it easy to keep learning. There was a butcher a short walk from home, a chicken shop, a seafood store, all places the family already used for their own groceries. Over months of showing up, the people behind the counters started recognizing Annie, and once that happens, things change: the offcuts nobody was going to buy, the bones, the organs, they'd get set aside without being asked. The Sydney Fish Market meant fresh sardines and salmon were never far off either. None of this took effort. It was just what Tuesday looked like.

What  Changed When The Family Returned To Singapore in 2018?

Singapore doesn't have a Sydney Fish Market, or a butcher who knows your dog's name. Almost everything is imported, and once Alsie was back, she realized how much she'd taken traceability for granted; in Sydney she'd known exactly where every scrap of Annie's dinner had come from, and in Singapore she suddenly didn't. Annie noticed the difference before Alsie fully processed it. Offered frozen meat from a supermarket shelf, she'd sniff it and walk away.

The commercial raw brands weren't the answer either. What was available locally upset Annie's stomach, and the properly sourced options, imported from Australia, cost close to triple what the family had paid at home. Week by week, Annie kept losing weight. By a few months in, she was down 4kg, and Alsie was running out of options that didn't involve giving up on fresh food entirely.

Started Formulating Annie's Food

So she stopped looking for a brand to trust and just started buying the ingredients herself again, good meat, organs, produce, and putting Annie's meals together at home the way she'd learned in Sydney. The formal certification came two years later, in 2022, less because she needed it to feed her own dog and more because she wanted the science underneath what she already knew, to feed a lot of other people's dogs eventually.

Annie started putting weight back on almost immediately. When a second Samoyed, Arthur, joined the family from another respected Australian breeder in 2019, he never had to go through any of it: home-formulated food was just what he grew up eating.

How Did A Home Kitchen Turn Into Annie's Pantry?

The business, if you could call it that yet, started with Alsie's sister-in-law. She moved back to Singapore in 2019 with her own dog, a cocker spaniel, and asked Alsie to prep for her too. Then it was a friend. Then a friend of that friend. Then, at some point Alsie can't quite pin down, people she'd never met were messaging her asking for the same food.

She kept saying yes. At one point she was spending roughly S$2,000 a month of her own money, feeding other people's dogs for nothing, because that's what you do when someone asks and you know how to help. Eventually the people asking wouldn't let her keep doing that for free, so she opened a store on Shopee just to make the payments official. The orders didn't slow down after that. They kept climbing, past anything one kitchen could keep up with.

James Barrie, The Next Phase Of Growth

There's a wide gap between cooking for a dozen dogs and cooking for hundreds, and Alsie needed someone who'd already crossed it. She found James Barrie, an Australian based in Singapore who was running a human-food commercial kitchen fitted with precision German processing equipment, HACCP-trained, with a manufacturing background, and, as it happened, one of the country's largest importers of kangaroo meat, already supplying other restaurants & pet food companies. She brought him on as co-founder.

The arrangement was straightforward from the start. Alsie formulates the food. James builds and protects the manufacturing process, and increasingly the farmer and supplier partnerships behind it, that turn a formula into thousands of consistent meals. Neither half works without the other, and that division is still how Annie's Pantry runs today.

Hyogo, Japan

Annie's Pantry ran through three different production spaces in Singapore, and outgrew every one of them, sometimes within months of moving in. Instead of finding a fourth space that would just mean a fifth move later, Alsie and James built something meant to last: a purpose-built, 25,000 sq ft facility in Hyogo, Japan, certified to ISO 22000, the international standard for food safety management.

The move gave them something they'd wanted since the Shopee days but never had the room for: a direct farm-to-tub sourcing model, where every ingredient can be traced back to where it came from. James runs the Hyogo factory full-time now and is building out the farmer and supplier partnerships that come with it. Alsie still does the work she started with in that first Singapore kitchen: formulating recipes, sourcing ingredients, and signing off on every batch for quality, now with 11 people around her instead of none..

Annie's Pantry At A Glance

Founder	Alsie Mori, Certified Advanced Canine Nutrition Specialist, Dogs Naturally University, 2022
Founder's role today	Product formulation, ingredient sourcing and quality assurance
Co-founder	James Barrie, HACCP-trained. He heads Annie's Pantry's production facility in Hyogo, Japan and leads farmer and supplier partnerships.
Origin	Home-formulated meals for a Samoyed named Annie in Singapore, 2018
Business founded	2019, beginning with an online store on Shopee
Production facility	25,000 sq ft production facility in Hyogo, Japan
Certification	ISO 22000
Sourcing model	Direct farm-to-tub sourcing through farms, meat packers and ingredient suppliers internationally, with 100% traceability
Team size	11 staff
Dogs fed	More than 2,500 dogs across Singapore and Japan as of 2026
Based in	Singapore, with production in Hyogo, Japan

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