About Meow Mini Mart

A few things inspired me…starting with my black cat Laszlo. When I adopted him in 2015, he was overgrooming and licking himself bald in spots. After many vet visits and $2500 later, it was determined that he was covered in yeast and had a food intolerance – and most likely the culprit was chicken. 

When nothing helped him, I went down the research rabbit hole and everything I read said that fresh food and the “raw food” diet was the solution. As a result, I transitioned him to a fresh food diet and within 2 weeks he stopped overgrooming and all his fur grew back. And he smelled “clean” and his poop was reduced by 50% with almost no odor!!

I was so amazed at his recovery, that I started blogging about how the raw food diet changed his life and mine literally. I decided that I would educate myself and share my findings regarding cat nutrition with our readers so that they could consider transitioning their cats to a fresh food diet too.

In the meantime, in 2017 I retired from my career in Fashion Retailing and started to look for something to create that would fill my “soul” and also be able to give back to my local community. 

I was volunteering for TLC (The Lucky Cat Rescue) and helping with their fundraising which was my first introduction to cat rescue. Also I attended my first cat convention, Cat Camp 2017 in NYC and met Jackson Galaxy , the Cat Daddy and Hannah Shaw, the Kitten Lady. It was at that show that I knew that I had found my “tribe” and that I would build a business concept around it to help other cat parents give their cats a better life with a few small lifestyle shifts starting with the diet.

In 2018 I opened Meow Mini Mart as an online shop catering to cats and cat lovers. We focused on cat toys, treats and gifts for the cat lover. The plan was to ‘give back” and raise money through our sales and to donate to our local cat rescue groups to help with the vet bills.

We started to build our name locally by doing various pop-ups at the Hoboken Art and Music Festivals, the Garden State Cat Show and Expo and other artisan markets around Hudson County.  I loved working with the customers at these events, and discovered that the cat parents felt very underserved (as did I) by the pet industry at large. They complained that so many of the pet stores seemed to focus mostly on the dogs and often offered higher quality food and treats for the dogs than for their cat customers. They also complained that many of the sales help couldn’t address their cat’s needs as many had never had a cat as a pet.

Almost immediately I knew I needed to open a pet “brick and mortar” specialty store dedicated to the cats. However the Pandemic got in the way, and finally in July 2023 I opened Meow Mini Mart officially in Jersey City Heights.