Margot Kenly
Blue Dog Bakery
Seattle, Wash.
Son: Colin ’08, studio art major, history minor

It’s usually a bad idea to snack on dog treats—but you might try a Blue Dog biscuit. It’s low-fat, all natural, and downright tasty, perhaps because owner Margot Kenly came to dog cookies by way of desserts.

Moving to Seattle in the 1980s, the former magnet-school principal was surprised to find that restaurants rarely made their own desserts. She loved to bake, so “I’d knock on restaurant doors holding a pan of fresh cheesecake and they’d say, ‘Oh, come on in!’” She and a partner built their Famous Pacific Desserts Company into a chain of six restaurants.

After a radio exposé on animal byproducts in dog treats made her “squeamish,” dog-lover Kenly set out to bake a better biscuit, with quality ingredients, in the shapes of farm animals, miniature Fig Newtons, and Easter bunnies (“Why do another boring dog-bone?” she grins). She started by taking a gallon-size baggie of her homemade biscuits to a pet-food buyer. Now the goodies, in seven flavors, sell at major supermarket and pet-store chains.

Kenly and her husband run Blue Dog from a Seattle houseboat, with help from sales reps nationwide and a few friendly canine taste-testers. Says Kenly, “If you can’t have fun with this business, you can’t have fun with anything.”