How Buddy Budder plans to ‘become the Jif’ of dog peanut butter

Along with beef and bacon, peanut butter has long been a popular flavor for dog treats, and about seven years ago, it occurred to Tamara Coleman, founder of Bark Bistro, that there might be a market for a line of peanut butter for pooches.

“No one was marketing peanut butter to dogs, peanut butter happens to be one of the No. 1 search terms for treats for dogs,” Coleman told Retail Brew.

Coleman had started Bark Bistro a couple years earlier as a boutique dog food company, but was daunted by the see-sawing price of beef and other proteins, and decided to stop making the dog-meal products and pivot to peanut butter. The product line would be called Buddy Budder, and Coleman, who at the time lived in Boca Raton, Florida, began producing it entirely in her kitchen in January 2019.

“This started in my townhouse kitchen with literally one Hamilton Beach food processor,” Coleman said. “I was just buying peanuts at Trader Joe’s or Publix, and I was just playing around with different flavors.”

The daily grind: At the beginning, it seemed that she wasn’t just working with peanuts; she was working for peanuts.

“The first six months were brutal. I was lucky if I sold a few jars a week,” Coleman wrote in an online publication in 2025. “What weighed most heavily wasn’t the lack of sales, but the doubt—the quiet moments when I wondered if my idea was too small to ever matter.”

But those doubts began to dissipate in July 2019, when Coleman launched Buddy Budder on Amazon. Dogs—as they’re wont to do—were begging for it, and by that December, sales for Buddy Budder had grown to $8,000 a month.

Growth has been steady since then, with YoY revenues growing 59.9% in 2022, 56.4% in 2023, 51.1% in 2024, and 48.8% in 2025, according to Bark Bistro.

Today Buddy Budder—which markets itself as “100% natural” and free of artificial sugar, artificial preservatives, palm oil, or hydrogenated oils—is available in an array of alliterative flavors including Barking Banana, Bangin’ Bacon, and Awesome Apple.

To be closer to its main supplier, Hawkinsville, Georgia’s Hardy Farms Peanuts, Coleman, a Georgia native, relocated to Atlanta, where Buddy Budder is produced in a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.

“Our goal is to become the Jif of the dog peanut butter world,” said Coleman, who’s charging considerably more for her offering, with a 16-ounce jar of Jif retailing for ~$4.50 at Walmart and Buddy Budder’s 17-ounce jars ranging from $11 to $17.

The US pet treat market was valued at $6.8 billion as of August 2025, according to Circana data cited by trade publication Pet Food Processing.

Main squeeze: Key to the company’s growth has been its 2022 introduction of 4-ounce reusable squeeze packs (like those used by baby food brands). It took four years after Buddy Budder was introduced to reach the milestone of selling 1 million jars of the product, but it took just 18 months to sell 1 million units of the squeeze packs, Coleman said.

Consumers wanted “a different delivery method,” Coleman said. “They didn’t want the jar, they didn’t want the spoon, the knife; they wanted something that was more mess-free.”

Coleman said the packaging also helps Buddy Budder stand out on grocery store shelves.

“Because there is a whole human aisle of peanut butter” that’s mostly packaged in jars, she said, “it’s the squeeze pouches that’s the attraction.”

Expanding in the grocery channel is a current focus for the brand’s growth, Coleman said, with Buddy Budder recently introduced in 464 Sprouts Farmers Markets across the US and currently expanding onto shelves of 50 Fresh Market locations, too.

Between expanding into the grocery channel and the novelty of a container of peanut butter for pets, it’s possible that some people will end up trying it, which Coleman said will do them no harm since it’s safe for human consumption.

Not long ago, Coleman heard from a customer about how she and her daughter discovered one morning that her husband had prepared an unusual nocturnal nosh.

‘“We noticed my husband’s been making peanut butter and jellies in the middle of the night, and half the [Buddy Budder] peanut butter is gone,’” Coleman recalled the customer saying. “‘[Is] he gonna be okay?’”

“And I was like, ‘Well, as long as he’s not barking, I’m sure he’s fine.”