If you want to know what's in Ugly Chews or any dog chew, you must know its source. Most chew companies can't tell you. We can.
Here's the actual journey of every Ugly Chew, from pasture to package.
It starts on a ranch in Nephi, Utah
The Wright family has been ranching in Juab County since the 1980s. That was when Korey Wright's father Bob got the operation started. Today Korey and his wife Emily run Bar W, a working cattle ranch. It sits on free-range pasture outside Nephi.
The cattle are born there. They graze there. They live their whole lives there. In this industry, cattle often cross state lines multiple times. They move between rancher, feedlot, processor, and packer. That makes Bar W unusual.
Why Bar W Beef exists
In 2024, Korey and Emily took the next step and built Bar W Beef. It is a state-of-the-art processing facility on the same land. COVID-era meat shortages confirmed what many ranchers already knew. The bottleneck in American beef supply is not cattle. It is processing capacity. Most ranchers ship animals hundreds of miles to giant centralized packers. They lose traceability and quality along the way.
The Wrights solved that for themselves. The facility processes around 40-50 cows a day, has a USDA inspector on-site, and handles everything in-house. They also buy cattle from neighboring Utah ranchers, supporting the small operations around them, not replacing them.
That facility is where every Ugly Chew begins.
Why this matters for an Ugly Chews dog chew
A beef hide is only as clean as the animal it came from. The Wrights raise low-stress, free-range cattle on Utah pasture. They finish them on their own feed lot. They process them in their own USDA facility. There are no middlemen or surprise sourcing. There is no chemical processing in any of the steps before us.
When we say our chews are single-ingredient, that's the chain we're standing behind. Bar W's cattle in, Ugly Chews out.
From Nephi to Evanston
The hides leave Bar W and travel about 230 miles north to our facility in Evanston, Wyoming.
In Evanston, the hides go through a slow, low-temperature drying process. There are no chemicals, bleach, or preservatives. We use temperature-controlled rooms with industrial fans and dehumidifiers. This lets us pull moisture out gradually. We never expose the hide to heat that would change texture or strip nutrients.
A hide takes days to dry properly. Most industrial rawhide operations can't afford the time. We took the slower path because it's the only way to keep the product honest. (We wrote about what the chemical alternative looks like in our rawhide post.)
Then it gets cut, sorted, packaged
Once a hide is dry, it gets cut into our different product formats. These include Hair-On Hide Rolls, Thins, Chips, Chunks & Scraps. Then it's sorted by size and bagged in recyclable packaging. We don't use the little plastic single-use bags the industry standard uses. Building a zero-waste business and triple-wrapping each product in plastic would be pointless.
What you get on the other end
You get a dog chew made of one ingredient. It comes from cattle that lived a few hundred miles away. That is from where the chew was finished. Every step in the chain is accounted for and named.
That's it. That's the whole pitch.
If you want to see what comes out of all this, the Sample Bundle is the easiest place to start.
If you already know what your dog likes, the Hair-On Hide Rolls are our most popular SKU for a reason.
FAQ
Where do Ugly Chews come from? Every Ugly Chew starts with beef hide from Bar W Beef. It is a USDA-inspected processing facility in Nephi, Utah, run by the Wright family. The hides are dried and finished at our facility in Evanston, Wyoming.
Are Ugly Chews made in the USA? Yes. The cattle are raised in Nephi, Utah. The hides are sourced from Bar W Beef in Nephi. The chews are produced in Evanston, Wyoming.
Who is Bar W Beef? Bar W Beef is a family-owned cattle ranch and USDA-inspected processing facility in Nephi, Utah. It is run by Korey and Emily Wright. The Wright family has been ranching in Juab County since the 1980s.
