Harbor Pet: Your One Stop Pet Shop in Greenport

Harbor Pet has been a Greenport staple since 2015, when owners Kim Loper and Andrew LoMonaco transformed a historic Main Street building into a hub for pets and their people. With original oak floors that honor the town’s hardware store past, Harbor Pet blends community charm with top-notch service, nutrition expertise, grooming, boarding, and their own Life Is Grruff treat bakery.

Dan’s Papers caught up with Kim Loper to discuss Harbor Pet’s offerings.

Tell us about Harbor Pet. Who are you and what do you do?

Life is Grruff started back in 2010 to go back even further. I was baking dog treats for my dogs for my friends’ dogs as gifts and stuff like that. When I was married, I started a company doing farmers markets and stuff. I worked for the family business, which was a garden center. Still did it on the side every now and again. And then we sold our family business, and I stayed on with the owners who bought the family business. Hence they, after a couple years, we decided to close that. One of them is now my business partner, Andrew Monaco, and he was like, “What are you gonna do?” I’m like, “I don’t know, bake dog treats again. See if I can get it to work. You want to be my business partner?” He’s like, “What do I gotta do?” I’m like, “Not much.” And we were off and running.

We were doing farmers markets. I was in farmers markets from Long Beach to Montauk. We sarted selling wholesale. The gentleman that used to own Harbor Pet in Greenport was one of our customers. He told me in March of 2014 that he was up for sale. I called my business partner. He was in the city, had a play with his wife. I said, we might be buying a store. He said, “No, we’re not.” I said, “I think we are.”

And that very next week, he came, we both went out, looked at it, talked to him, and within a month, took that over, and then the rest is kind of history. We have a mobile bus. We have merchandise branded to our name. We go to events, fairs. I still do the farmers markets. About seven years ago, we started using the spent grains from local breweries and up-cycling them into dog treats. The spent grains are what they use to steep the beer, they take out the starches and the sugars. What they’re left with is the fiber and the protein. So we went through a couple different processes of trying to figure out how to make it work in a treat. When we what we finally evolved into was dehydrating them back out and milling it into a flower.

And then that’s the flour that we use in four of our dog treats. It’s a line called growlers with two R’s, play on name for a brewery, play on name for dogs, and we have four flavors looking to expand it into seasonal flavors. This year, we just launched our first dehydrated treats. We do chicken breast and beef liver, and we’ll be doing beef hearts and other, I guess, organs, as far as dehydrated and freeze dried organs.

Why Greenport?

That was the business we could get from the guy selling. It’s great. I love it. I mean, just seeing all the dogs and having all the regular locals, the second homers, the tourists, it’s a different type of pet store. We’re the hometown pet store. Everybody’s like, “Oh, I need to bring my dog something home. What can I bring them?” And our treats fit in perfectly, because it’s like, “Here, this is from Greenport. We make these.” So it’s gone hand in hand and we are one of the many shops people love to walk into in the village. Two to three times a day we get people who say, “My dog just dragged me in.”

Are those seasonal flavors classified information at this time?

No, but it’s probably actually going to be for next year. We’re going to start like a whole seasonal line, starting probably with Valentine’s Day. Our treats have to be registered every year. So cost wise, it’s the same price if we register them in November or if we register them in January, because the registration is up in December. So probably going to hold off on everything, and then start a seasonal line next year where we go do Valentine’s Day. We’ll probably do Easter too. We’re going to start packaging them in crowler cans, which are the larger of the beer cans. You know, you’re still going to get your eight ounces that you would put in a bag, but now you have an aluminum can. It’s a little bit more sustainable. You can recycle it. We’re really, we’re really trying to really do a lot with a sustainable aspect of it, even even maybe next year, trying to turn our bags into more of a compostable or biodegradable type of bag.

Do you see more business in the summer or in the fall?

Probably, if you had to compare the two, probably more in the summer, August is pretty big for us. A lot of the times, the retailers and restaurants notice that, because of the pumpkin farms, people don’t try and push through that and get out to us as much.

Tell me a little bit more about the grooming services plus what you have for cats.

We supply everything for cats, food, toys, scratchers, everything. We try and carry everything so that someone does not have to go to Riverhead. We like to keep our locals, we keep our prices kind of low just to cater to everybody. As far as grooming, we have top notch groomers. We just moved our grooming, two years ago, out of our building and took over the building on the other side of our driveway. So we moved the grooming into there, and the hopes to be able to groom more dogs, as well as added to self wash stations, which has really been taking off. Because it’s great, if someone has been at the beach and the dog’s all standing, they can just come in, wash the dog, leave the mess, or in the winter, when the dogs are full of snow and mud from the icky weather.

What are other ways you are a major part of the Greenport community?

We host the North Fork Dock Diving Weekend the first weekend in June every year. This year we brought it to Greenport polo grounds, and we were able to get 20 other businesses involved in it by donating by sponsorships, and we did it as a fundraiser, both for the fire department and for the Greenport skate park. We were able to raise $10,000 to give to the skate park to help with the renovations that hopefully are going to start either latest next spring, and then $4,000 to the fire department. Like I said, next year is going to be our 10th year, so we’re going to try and make it bigger. This year, we added a dunk tank and a huge 60 foot obstacle, blow up obstacle course for the kids I’m looking to like, add like, peanut butter licking contests and wall jumps and splash pads, and make it a fall full on festival.

Harbor Pet is located at 120 Main Street in Greenport and can be reached at 631-477-1518 or harbor-pet.com.