How a Himalayan Product Became a Global Business
The story behind Dogsee Chew, and how Bhupendra Khanal turned a traditional Himalayan product into an international pet brand.
Some of the best business opportunities do not begin with a startup idea. They begin with something ordinary that has been sitting around for generations, waiting for someone to look at it differently. For Bhupendra Khanal, that opportunity was churpi, a traditional hard cheese from the Himalayan region. What began as an exploration into Himalayan food products eventually became Dogsee Chew, a pet food business that now exports to 30 countries and has grown into a business worth hundreds of crores.
But Khanal was not originally looking to build a pet food company. After building and exiting his software company, Simplify 360, he found himself thinking about what he should do next. Technology was the obvious path, but he wanted to explore something outside software. He began looking at the food industry and noticed a gap: the Himalayan region had an enormous variety of products, flavours and food traditions, yet very few had been turned into large consumer brands. His initial ambition was to build something like an “Haldiram of the Himalayas”, bringing products from Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and other parts of the Himalayan belt to a much larger market.
The Product He Wasn't Looking For
Khanal began travelling through the region, studying its food and understanding the differences between the hills and the plains. He started seeing that Himalayan products could have relevance far beyond their traditional consumers. The flavours, for example, were not necessarily limited to Himalayan communities. The kind of spicy food people in the region enjoyed could also appeal to consumers in places such as Korea, Mexico, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. He was beginning to think less about selling Himalayan food to Himalayan people and more about finding global markets for products that had something inherently different about them.
The turning point came during a visit to a friend's dairy in Darjeeling. Khanal was told that dogs would often steal churpi when they got excited. To the dairy owner, this was simply a nuisance. Khanal saw it as a possible product insight. As a third-generation pet parent, he understood that dogs naturally being attracted to the product could indicate strong palatability. He bought 22 kilograms of churpi and took it back to Bangalore, where the idea began to develop into something more serious.
His wife, Sneha, who had a marketing background, immediately began looking at the product from a different perspective. Churpi was hard, natural, high in protein, had no preservatives and had the potential to support dental health because of the amount of chewing it required. These characteristics gave them the beginnings of a value proposition, but they still needed to answer the most important business question: Was there a market big enough to build a company around this product?
From Churpi to a Global Market
Khanal did not rely on instinct alone. He travelled to different Indian cities, spoke with veterinary doctors, sent the product to laboratories and studied the pet industry. What he discovered was that the market opportunity had very little to do with the size of the churpi market itself. The global pet industry was already enormous, with Khanal estimating it at more than $130 billion, while pet food represented roughly $70–80 billion and dental treats represented another multi-billion-dollar category.
That changed the way he looked at churpi. It was no longer simply a traditional Himalayan cheese that could be packaged differently. It was a potential solution inside a massive global category. Its hardness could make it useful as a dental chew, its protein content gave it a nutritional angle, and its long-lasting nature created another reason for pet owners to buy it. The product did not need millions of people to suddenly start eating churpi. It needed pet owners to recognize why their dogs would want it.
This was where Khanal's technology background became important. During his years in Bangalore, he had developed what he describes as a “Bangalore mindset”: if you build something in Bangalore, the assumption is that it should be good enough to compete anywhere in the world. He carried the same thinking into this completely unfamiliar industry. Instead of asking how to build the biggest churpi business in India, he began asking how to make the best churpi in the world.
Building Dogsee Chew for the World
That global mindset influenced the company's expansion from the beginning. The Indian pet market was growing, but compared with markets such as Europe, the UK, Japan and the United States, it was still relatively small. Khanal therefore looked at the global pet industry rather than limiting the company's ambition to India. Dogsee Chew eventually entered markets across Europe, the UK, China, Japan and other countries, and today exports to 30 countries.
Japan was particularly significant for Khanal. Growing up, Japanese products represented a benchmark of quality, and he remembered the fascination people had with Japanese radios and other electronics. Getting Dogsee Chew into Japan therefore represented more than another international sale. It was a personal confirmation that a product built around a Himalayan tradition could meet the standards of one of the world's most demanding markets.
There was no single formula for entering all these countries. In Japan, Dogsee Chew worked with consultants who understood the market. In the UK, the company worked through distributors while providing marketing support from Bangalore. The team attended global pet industry events such as Global Pet Expo and Interzoo, searched for partners and worked through the regulatory requirements of individual markets. Khanal's approach was essentially to treat every country as a new problem to solve rather than assume that one distribution model would work everywhere.
The Real Opportunity Was Bigger Than Dogsee Chew
Khanal's vision for churpi also goes beyond his own company. He believes the global market for Himalayan churpi is still in its early stages and that the category has enormous room to grow. He estimates the existing global churpi market at around half a billion dollars, while pointing to the product's natural characteristics as reasons why it could capture a much larger share of the pet treat market.
What is particularly interesting is how he thinks about competition. Rather than viewing other churpi manufacturers as threats, Khanal believes they can help create the market. If more businesses produce, market and distribute churpi internationally, consumers become more familiar with the category and the entire industry grows. His attitude is that the opportunity is too large to spend all the energy fighting over the market that already exists.
He sees churpi potentially becoming a global identity for the Himalayas. His comparison is Scotch whisky: whisky can be produced around the world, but Scotch has a distinct identity because of its geographical and cultural origin. In the same way, he believes “Himalayan churpi” can become a recognizable premium category internationally. For Nepal in particular, he sees it as a potential global identity alongside Mount Everest, Gautam Buddha and the Sherpas.
Why India Became the Business Base
That raises an obvious question for Nepali entrepreneurs: if churpi has such a strong connection to Nepal and the Himalayas, why did Khanal build the business from India? His answer is primarily strategic. Nepali entrepreneurs were already producing churpi in Nepal, while India presented an opportunity to become an early player in a much larger market. There were also regulatory barriers affecting Nepali churpi exports into markets such as the European Union and the UK because of differences in recognized dairy standards.
Building from India therefore gave Khanal a more practical route to international markets. The decision was less about where churpi originated and more about where the business could operate most effectively. It is an important distinction for entrepreneurs working with local products: the place where a product comes from does not necessarily have to be the place from which its global business is built.
But establishing a business in India did not eliminate the hardest problem. Churpi itself is difficult to manufacture at scale. The product can take 60–70 days to dry, while farmers need to be paid regularly and working capital remains tied up during production. Quality control is also difficult because excessive drying can cause cracking, while insufficient drying can lead to fungus. What looks like a simple traditional product becomes a complicated industrial process when you try to produce it consistently for international customers.
Building the Supply Chain Behind the Brand
As the business grew, Khanal realized that simply having international demand was not enough. The supply chain needed to grow with it. Instead of treating churpi manufacturers purely as suppliers, he began working with them to improve production. He provided advances, supported equipment research and helped producers understand how they could increase their output and earnings.
The philosophy was straightforward: the producers should focus on making the product while the company focused on creating and expanding the market. By strengthening the people at the production end, Dogsee Chew could create a more reliable supply of the product it needed to grow. Over time, the company also began investing more heavily in its own manufacturing capabilities and opening factories.
This is an important part of the Dogsee Chew story because it shows that building a global brand around a local product is not just a marketing exercise. Once demand grows, every weakness in the supply chain becomes a business problem. Manufacturing, financing, quality control, certifications and distribution all have to develop alongside the brand.
One Product Created Another Business
The deeper Khanal went into the churpi supply chain, the more opportunities he discovered. One of them was ghee, which was often produced as a by-product and left Himalayan producers with more supply than they could easily sell. Instead of seeing that as waste, Khanal saw another business opportunity.
That eventually became Himalayan Natives, a premium food brand built around products sourced from the Himalayan region. The company launched in late 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted traditional retail and distribution. As larger companies struggled with the disruption, the smaller brand was able to move quickly, expand its listings and take advantage of the changing market.
The lesson was bigger than ghee. Once Khanal understood the supply chain behind churpi, he could see other products that could potentially be connected to the same ecosystem. The original business had started with one product, but the underlying opportunity was much larger: build businesses around high-quality Himalayan products and create the market access they had previously lacked.
The Brand Was Built Around People
Dogsee Chew and Himalayan Natives eventually developed different approaches to branding. Himalayan Natives was designed as a more institutional, premium brand, while Dogsee Chew became much more founder-driven. Bhupendra and Sneha actively became part of the brand's public identity, reflecting their belief that consumers connect more strongly with people than with faceless corporations.
That philosophy also shapes how Khanal thinks about marketing. He does not see marketing as an expense that businesses should constantly try to reduce. For a consumer company, marketing is an investment in creating demand. The product has to create customer pull, while sales, distribution and supply chain systems make it possible to fulfil that demand.
He also believes the CEO ultimately has to be the company's salesperson. That does not mean the founder needs to handle every sale or every piece of marketing. It means the founder has to understand the value of selling, understand the customer and be able to communicate why the business deserves to exist.
The same thinking extends to external partners. Khanal argues that marketing agencies, consultants, manufacturers and other partners should not be treated simply as vendors. If they are helping represent the company, they are effectively an extension of the brand. Treating them as partners creates a different level of ownership and collaboration, which ultimately affects how the brand reaches the customer.
What Dogsee Chew Means for Nepal
The most important part of Khanal's story may not actually be Dogsee Chew. It may be what the story says about the possibilities sitting inside Nepal and the wider Himalayan region.
Nepal has products that are deeply rooted in local communities, but the people who know how to make those products are not always the people who know how to build international brands. They may lack access to capital, distribution, marketing expertise, regulatory knowledge or international customers. That does not necessarily mean the products lack potential. It means the connection between the product and the market has not yet been built.
Khanal's journey offers one model for solving that problem. An entrepreneur can combine modern business skills with traditional local knowledge, working with producers who already understand the product while bringing in the capabilities needed to create global demand. The producer does not have to become an international marketer, and the entrepreneur does not have to become the person making the product. The opportunity is in connecting the two.
That is why his vision for churpi extends beyond one company. He believes Nepal could build an entire industry around it if entrepreneurs, producers and policymakers worked together to improve standards, production and international market access. Certifications such as ISO, HACCP and BRC become important not simply as bureaucratic requirements but as mechanisms for building trust in the product and, eventually, in the country that produces it.
The Business Lesson Behind Dogsee Chew
The story of Dogsee Chew is ultimately not about discovering that dogs like churpi. That was the spark, but it was not the business.
The business came from everything that happened afterward: validating the product, identifying a global market, building a brand, developing distribution, solving manufacturing problems, supporting producers, meeting international standards and continuing to think beyond the market immediately in front of you.
Khanal did not invent churpi. He did something equally important from a business perspective: he changed the context in which people saw it.
A product that had existed for generations in the Himalayas became a solution for a global pet industry. A traditional supply chain became the foundation for an international business. A local product became a brand that could sit on shelves in Japan, Europe and other markets around the world.
And that may be the bigger lesson for Nepali entrepreneurs.
The next global business may not require inventing something completely new. It may already exist in a form that people have overlooked for generations.
The product can be local. The market can be global. What changes the equation is the ambition to connect the two.
