Duck Bread

It’s fun to feed the ducks at the park, right? But really: you know that regular bread is bad for them.

So we’re making Duck Bread.

And you can get it now. It’s for sale!

This is it! This is the physical product we’ve been working on as a family; it’s ready for showtime now; we just launched the online shop where you can buy a pack and give it a try.

Here’s the deal.

We learned that while ducks love to nibble your leftover sandwiches, regular-old human bread is bad for them. It doesn’t have the nutrients they need, and in extreme cases can cause developmental diseases in ducklings.

So: we made Duck Bread: it’s a treat for ducks and waterfowl that you can actually feel good about feeding them. It comes in small packs, so you can throw it in your picnic basket or backpack, and have it ready the next time you meet some ducks.

I’ll write more about the journey of launching this, but I can recap some highlights.

We did a ton of research about what ducks actually eat in the wild, and what is in commercial duck feed, and found a formula that works as a treat for them: full of protein and other nutrients they need.

Then we worked with experts in Kansas that pilot new food production - including traveling there, donning out white coats and hairnets, and testing and refining the production process.

I’m no stranger to making physical things. But while I started my career in real product design, it’s been a while since I’ve moved so many atoms around to bring one of our ideas to life, and not just for a client.

This was so fun: dialing in the recipe, designing the packaging as a family, traveling to the production facility, even renting a box van to drive pallets back home to Lawrence.

We’ve been testing it with waterfowl of all sorts, and (just as we hoped) they love it.

So we’re ready! We’ve got product, we’ve got packages, we’ve got shipping figured out.

We even commissioned some illustrations!; if you get it online from duckbread.fun, we’ll slip a zine in with each order, with new drawings from Charlotte Fleming. Hopefully that’ll be the first of a series.

So. That’s the v1 of Duck Bread. Next we need to actually… tell people about it!

We certainly have told the fowl. They love it.