Your Dog’s Food Probably Comes From a Factory Farm. Meet Some Folks Who Want to Change That
The pet food industry traditionally relies on factory farm byproducts for its ingredients, a practice the industry touts as more sustainable as it produces less waste and cheaper food. But dog owners distrust this mysterious supply chain.
Photo courtesy of The Conscious Pet
There are some 90 million dogs in the US alone, and their protein needs are rattling the human food chain. Humans are worried about what’s in dog food, not to mention what dog food is in––way too much non-recyclable packaging.
Buying trends show that pet owners are gravitating toward human-grade ingredients. “Dog food” is regulated loosely compared to human fare, allowing even meat deemed unfit for human consumption due to things such as disease and contamination and moldy grains, a recipe for endless pet food recalls.
The pet food industry traditionally relies on factory farm byproducts for its ingredients, a practice the industry touts as more sustainable as it produces less waste and cheaper food. But dog owners distrust this mysterious supply chain.
As shoppers seek more wholesome foods for pets, some also try to make eco-friendly choices, which seems to contradict a diet of human-grade foods, especially meat. Agriculture contributes at least 11 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and meat is the biggest contributor among foods.
Is there a way to make healthier dog food that won’t burden the planet so much? Here is how a few companies are dishing up new models.
Farm Hounds
Family farms often struggle to stay profitable as agriculture becomes more concentrated. There were 141,733 fewer farms in the US in 2022 than in 2017, according to the Census of Agriculture.
Livestock farmers who practice regenerative farming, improving soil and biodiversity with methods such as rotational grazing, strive to waste nothing and can still wind up with leftovers. Like the hog tails, hides, organs, and hooves that aren’t always suitable for compost.
“From our experience, most regenerative farms don’t have much of an active market for these products,” says Stephen Calsbeek, co-founder of Farm Hounds, a company that partners with regenerative farms to make single-ingredient treats for dogs.
“It is rare to meet a new farm and hear they are already capturing and selling something we are looking for,” he says. Where items like muscle meat and organs have a route to human markets, Farm Hounds looks for trim, miscuts and excess volume.
It started sourcing scraps from places such as White Oak Pastures, a farm in Bluffton, Georgia committed to regenerative and humane farming techniques.
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White Oak Pastures uses “radically traditional” farming methods. Learn how they are storing more carbon in the soil than pasture-raised cows emit during their lifetimes.
Customers couldn’t get enough of the local grass-farmed treats. With that, the store’s pup-loving proprietors launched Farm Hounds, dehydrating raw items in their home kitchen, which they now sell online as well.
Over time, collaboration with a single farm grew into a whole network, with new partners continually being added to meet the demand.
“We are talking with very busy farmers, who then have to sort out how to capture and store the products we are looking for,” says Calsbeek. “It can take six to 12 months before we see our first order.” Farms that use an offsite processor have to ask the processor to return parts they aren’t used to capturing. “Depending on how strict the USDA inspector is, it can require the farm and the processing facility to update their HACCP plan just to capture something for us.”
For most of the farms, the added revenue from using every part of the animal has been “impactful,” says Calsbeek. Some have changed their practices. Polyface, a renowned farm in Virginia, now breeds its birds on-site, having learned that Farm Hounds would purchase the roosters (male chicks are culled at hatcheries). At times, it’s a safety net if a human market is lost; during the COVID lockdown, for example, a key buyer for one farm stopped ordering products that had already been raised. “We’ve seen farms able to hire more workers in their community due to our purchasing.”
Today, in addition to a variety of treats and chews of all sizes, Farm Hounds sells items that even make use of their own leftovers. In recent years, the company, which now has a nationwide following, has landed on the Inc. 5000 list, ranking among America’s fastest-growing independent businesses.
The Conscious Pet
No discussion of vanishing farmland or concerns about wasting human grade food on pets is complete without a mention of food waste—when 30 percent to 40 percent of the entire US food supply gets dumped in landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the US discards nearly 40 million tons of food every year, more than any other country.
One solution is to upcycle it. The Conscious Pet, an Austin-based company started by Mason Arnold and Jessica Kezar Arnold, makes human-grade dog food and treats by dehydrating scraps from local restaurants, breweries, and food distributors.
This isn’t stuff they glean from trash cans.
“Think of a kitchen that trims their steaks or chicken before cooking their meals,” says Arnold, a sustainability-minded entrepreneur who hosts a podcast with Kezar-Arnold called “A Mostly Green Life”—part of a community of people focused on “clean living” and environmental stewardship.
Initially, they partnered with a composting facility, capturing suitable meat and vegetable scraps, which they now collect directly from a variety of sources. While composting helps keep waste out of landfills, they knew it wasn’t the best use of edible food.
So, they experimented with recipes in their home kitchen, creating products to sell in the perfect incubator—Austin, home to 500,000 pups and owners who spend the most on dog food of any major city. A city ordinance requires restaurants to responsibly dispose of organic waste, which can mean a solution such as repurposed pet food.
“The first batches looked like dog food already, just not in the right shape as it was mostly powder with a few clumps,” says Arnold. “It took us six months or so to develop the first usable recipe and, honestly, it took over 1.5 years to perfect it.”
DoggieBag, the human-grade kibble, is lightly cooked and shelf stable. The recipe uses 85 percent sustainably sourced animal protein and about 15 percent organic vegetables. Only the vitamin additives aren’t from scraps.
The zero-waste company, which uses clean energy and compostable packaging, kicked off in 2022 by offering locals a chance to own a part of it. It is currently moving to a new facility and plans to relaunch its line of products this fall, says Arnold.
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“It isn’t hard to get something going, but [it] does require investment in the machinery to accomplish the process,” says Arnold. Another challenge has been the stigma around food waste. People often imagine the ruins of meals in trash cans, not kitchen trimmings and dented packaging.
“That fresh product is still consumable and delicious and could be used to make soups and such for humans, but we take it and make pet food out of it.”
With the country’s ample supply of leftovers, it’s a model that could be used in other cities, says Arnold.
“We’re excited to start partnering with others who want to implement this technology, and welcome any inquiries from people or companies wanting to do it in their town.”
Open Farm
A new national strategy for reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030 includes “raising and breeding insects as livestock.”
Even meat giant Tyson Foods is getting into insects for use in the pet food, aquaculture, and livestock industries.
Vying to be the next big protein are crickets, black soldier fly larvae (grubs) and mealworms, all approved for use in dog food in the US. These tiny animals yield high-quality protein, can eat food waste, and can be eaten as food. Their excrement, frass, is a rich fertilizer for agriculture.
When it comes to sustainability, experts say insect farming uses less land and water, and it has fewer emissions. With their high food conversion rate, insects can convert two kilograms of feed into one kg of insect mass, while cattle require eight kg of feed to produce one kg of body weight gain. Crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and two times less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein. Black soldier fly larvae, among the most efficient insect species, develop in two to three weeks.
So far, consumers aren’t rushing in. Only one US company has developed an insect-based kibble, while one that started with a bang—Grubbly Farms—has switched its promising entry into dog food to backyard chickens.
But the infrastructure is growing. EnviroFlight, a company that produces black soldier fly larvae, opened the first US production facility in Maysville, Kentucky in 2018, while Oregon-based Chapul Farms is working on various aspects of insect agriculture. Tyson plans to build a US facility that supports every stage of insect protein production from breeding to hatching of larvae. All the companies, even leading dog food brands, see insect-based pet food as a growing market.
It’s similar to traditional dog food, trading ground-up meat or fish for insects as the main protein. Grubs, the most common source, provide all 10 essential amino acids dogs require.
Adding an insect kibble made sense to Canadian dog food maker Open Farm, which put grubs on the menu in 2022, sourcing protein for its black soldier fly larvae kibble with consideration of its environmental impacts and processing. Since there’s no animal welfare certification for grubs, it sought suppliers that adhere to the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare, ensuring healthy living conditions. The grubs are humanely euthanized with high heat.
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But it turned out that “the demand was a little low,” says spokesperson Bridget Trumper. The company has discontinued its Kind Earth Insect recipe. “We hope as these options become more popular, we will be able to bring this recipe back, and introduce additional insects.”
There was a twist, however, in pet owners snubbing the unconventional animal protein.
“Surprisingly, our plant-based recipes were more popular and we will be continuing to offer those,” says Trumper. The company thinks it has to do with greater familiarity with a vegetarian diet. For now, it plans to monitor the trends and educate pet owners on the environmental benefits of alternative proteins.
“We believe, in time, pet parents will come around to the idea,” says Trumper.
Innovations in pet food can make a difference on a local scale and beyond. Farm Hounds’ use of farm waste can be adopted in other areas, and the company has gone from selling products in its local stores to a nationwide online business with a network of farm partners that has extended to other states, including California—and it ranks as one of the fastest-growing independent businesses, making the Inc. 5000 list the past two years. Food waste is another resource that could be tapped around the country to improve pet health with human-grade by-products. As Mars, the world’s largest pet food manufacturer, Tyson, and other companies add insects to the menu while researchers seek ways to breed bigger insects faster, the potential grows for reducing the impacts of factory meat farming.
Fabulous fabulous. Get rid of China mystery dog food. Decades ago I had a dog that was not able to eat anything on the shelves. I researched online and called and emailed dog food companies. I could safely say dog food was coming from USA who bought it from China. Those days I could not even get a list of ingredients (we have come a long way). The only real info was from other dog owners all experienced similar sickness and death of their dogs. The only good dog food was a local organic mom pop place. I gave up… Read more »
These farms with human grade products are much appreciated. I wish they had been available years ago for i truly regret feeding our dogs commercial dog food, even specialty types. The raw, humane, family run farm products described here sound so great!.🙏😊
……researchers seek ways to breed bigger insects faster……
This is messing with nature. Bigger, faster isn’t always the best. How can this be done naturally, no chemicals or other harmful ingredients.
Give Jiminys pet food a try! https://jiminys.com/