It started with one dog in Sioux Falls

Rawly was not born from a business plan. It was born from one dog who was not doing well, and an owner who refused to accept that as normal.

Nate Gerry grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He left to play safety at Nebraska, where he was a three-time All-Big Ten pick and an All-American, then spent his professional career as an NFL linebacker and won a Super Bowl with the Philadelphia Eagles. In that world, nutrition is not a lifestyle choice. It is the job. What you eat shows up on film.

Then there was Koba, his cane corso, living the good life out on the lake. Except the problems kept stacking up: digestive trouble and loose stools, bacterial infections, allergies, and arthritis at an age far too young for it. Each issue got treated. None of them stayed gone.

So Nate did what he had done his whole career: he went looking for the root cause in the fuel. Down the rabbit hole of canine nutrition he found the BARF method, a biologically appropriate raw diet built on raw meat, organs, and bone. He rebuilt Koba's bowl around it. Within a few short weeks, the issues that had piled up over years began to clear. Firmer stools, calmer skin, a dog moving like himself again.

One dog's turnaround is a story, not proof. So he ran it like a training camp: family friends' dogs first, then a handful of hunting dogs dealing with the same kinds of issues. Two weeks in, the feedback was tremendous. The same pattern, dog after dog. That was the moment Rawly stopped being an experiment and became a company.

What started in one Midwest kitchen now runs on a bigger scale, with production and distribution across the country. The standard did not move with it. Organ meats and meaty bones, carrots and sweet potatoes, blueberries and flax, all traceable, all made in an SQF Level 2 certified facility here in the United States. That is the whole model: a small team, ingredients we can trace, and a product we feed our own dogs first, because that is who it was built for.

What we stand on

Three commitments