DARF: "What took days now takes an hour"

Watch: Alexander Molenaar on DARF’s switch to BESTMIX

The Story

DARF has been producing its own fresh meat for raw pet food for about 25 years, and today ships raw food and kibble across Europe. Its promise to pet owners is full transparency: every ingredient traced “from seed all the way to slaughter.”

The recipes behind that promise lived in Excel sheets that kept getting slower, more convoluted and more likely to crash. Then, at Interzoo four years ago, a BESTMIX employee walked up to DARF’s stand with one question:

“Do you want to step out of the Excel sheets and start living in the modern world?”

Alexander Molenaar was sceptical. He took the demo anyway, started with a single user and expanded from there. Four years later:

“We’ve never looked back since.”

Alexander Molenaar, DARF

Three moments worth watching for

1. The sceptics

“There’s no computer program going to tell me how to do my job.”

That was the first reaction from DARF’s most experienced people. Alexander didn’t argue with their gut feeling. He told them: “I’m not taking away the feeling. I’m putting numbers on your feeling.” A few weeks later, one of those colleagues said the line Alexander calls the best part of the whole project.

2. The vet’s question

“How are you able to do this so rapidly?”

Every new DARF recipe is checked with a vet. Developing one used to take two to three days. Now DARF sends five or six versions of a recipe in about an hour. The vet, whose own sheets were getting harder to manage, wanted to know how. Then he asked Alexander a question of his own.

3. Goodbye, crashing macros

“Your macros crashed, please restart.”

Every Excel user knows that message. Alexander explains why DARF’s sheets had become “slow, laggy, prone to crashing”, how a hands-on onboarding moved the whole company over in four or five weeks, and why he calls BESTMIX “a solver that thinks with you instead of arguing against you.”

About DARF

Company	DARF
What they make	Raw pet food and kibble
Based in	The Netherlands
Experience	About 25 years producing their own fresh meat
Team	About 35 people across production, planning, finance, quality assurance and account management
Markets	The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Baltic states and Ireland, and still expanding across Europe
Promise	Transparency and traceability, “from seed all the way to slaughter”
Using BESTMIX	Four years

Fresh pet food is moving from niche to standard product, and the rules are catching up. Watch Alexander explain how BESTMIX keeps DARF on top today, and where it goes next as BESTMIX connects into the new dashboard that ties DARF’s systems together.

Watch the full interview Book a BESTMIX demo