PetPeople held its grand opening in October, kitty-corner from the Washtenaw Whole Foods in the former Wright & Filippis store. Marketing manager Terri Montigny, who traveled to the opening from the company’s home base in Ohio with her basset hound Freckles, says PetPeople doesn’t intentionally locate near Whole Foods but acknowledges the overlap in clientele. Freckles, happily waddling around the new store, eats Primal frozen food. At $29.99 for four pounds, this is one of PetPeople’s most expensive products. It’s sold frozen, because it is 77 percent raw meat, organ, and bone–“more amino acids–they aren’t all cooked out of it,” she says. She thaws it for Freckles, of course, and she doesn’t necessarily recommend this royal treatment for every dog. Freckles has “allergies and yeast problems,” and Primal contains no grain of any kind.

In other words, it’s gluten free. Raw, gluten-free, and grain-free (meaning no rice or corn either) foods are enjoying some vogue in the pet world. Montigny says dogs and cats “don’t process grains as easily as people do.” Instead, Primal, like several other gluten-free brands sold here, contains non-grain starches, like peas, potatoes, tapioca, squash, and even kale.

PetPeople also carries more conventional wheat- or corn-bearing kibble, though you won’t find any Purina here. Montigny has a sense of humor about some of the extreme lengths these companies go to maintain their street cred in the organic world. “The Orijen sales rep once contacted me to tell me they’d switched egg vendors. They found out their eggs weren’t free-range or something.” Orijen, a Canadian company, also boasts fresh regional ingredients and a maximum of seventy-two hours from their kitchen to store shelves, making it a kind of farm-to-table doggy dining experience.

In the back of the store are self-service dog-wash stalls. For $13.95, everything is supplied, from several kinds of soap to rubber aprons. There’s an extra-big stall for a dog to just lie on the floor and be soaped up and hosed down–good for old dogs or dogs with hip issues.

Store manager Sue Howarth is also a dog owner (her dog Wyatt is usually the “store dog” but wasn’t on hand for the grand opening because store policy only allows one store dog at a time), so a lot of the conversation with her and Montigny was about dogs, but PetPeople serves cats, too–they’ve got food, toys, clothing, bedding, vitamins, collars, and leashes.

PetPeople, 3330 Washtenaw, 677-6922. Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-9 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m.-8 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (dog wash closes one hour earlier). petpeoplestores.com