Where our yak cheese begins.

Lo Manthang sits at 9,200 feet in the Mustang district of Nepal — a stone-walled town in a wind-cut valley closer to Tibet than to Kathmandu. The road in is unpaved most of the year. The road in is closed half of the year. Trade has been moving through here for a thousand years, and yak cheese — chhurpi — has been moving with it.

Pemba Sherpa runs the cooperative we buy from. Six families, one shared barn, eighty-four working yaks across three valleys. Pemba is the third generation in his family to make chhurpi this way: milk the yaks at first light, separate the cream, hand-stretch the curd until it ropes, salt it lightly, and hang it from open wooden frames in the dry alpine air. Two months of cold sun does the rest. No preservatives. No machinery. The cheese hardens to the density of bone — what dogs in the West now know as the long-lasting yak chew.

What surprised us when we first started buying from Pemba in 2023: the cheese isn't made for dogs. It's made for people. For shepherds spending three weeks at high altitude with no refrigeration, chhurpi is what stays in your pocket and gets gnawed on for hours, the way Westerners chew gum. The first dog chew company that pivoted this for the pet market did so almost by accident — the cheese was already perfect for a dog who needs an hour to settle.

We ship Pemba's chhurpi in fourteen formats — flavors and sizes — through the mountain passes to Kathmandu, then by air to Wixom. Every shipment carries a lot number tied to the cooperative, and we visit Mustang every twelve to eighteen months. Last visit: October 2025, just before the snow closed the pass.

A few things we've learned that don't fit anywhere else:

— Yak cheese chews are the only product in our catalog that improves with age. The drier and harder, the longer the chew lasts. Some buyers age them another month at home before giving them to particularly enthusiastic chewers.

— Chhurpi has more protein per gram than beef and almost no fat. Dogs respond to this the way they respond to fish — fast, attentive, focused.

— The flavored variants we sell — turmeric, blueberry, honey, mint — are not traditional. They're requests we made of the cooperative based on what dogs in Wixom seemed to prefer. Pemba's family was skeptical of the blueberry. The blueberry outsells the plain.

This chapter is the foundation of the catalog. Twelve products, one supplier, a relationship we've spent three years building. The cheese itself was perfected over a thousand years. We just figured out how to ship it.

— Pemba Sherpa, third-generation chhurpi maker · Lo Manthang, Mustang district · last visited October 2025

From this chapter.

• 

  Himalayan Gourmet Cheese Chew - Pack of 4 - Small

  $24.99

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  Himalayan Yak Cheese Chew — Rich Protein, Low Fat Single-Ingredient Dog Chews | Gluten-Free, Lactose-Friendly | All Life Stages

  $18.99