Pet food sustainability summary
- Pet food overall represents a significant share of global agricultural emissions
- Dog food has higher emissions than cat food globally
- Some dog diets can exceed owners’ vegan diets’ carbon impacts
- Sustainability depends on meat cuts with impacts varying 65 times
- Industry responses include regenerative agriculture, cultivated meat, and plant based options
Pets, unlike humans, don’t know what climate change is. Yet this does not mean that they, or to be more specific, their food, is not making an impact on the environment.
Pet food actually makes up a significant chunk of agricultural emissions globally. Why is this, and how can food companies mitigate it?
Environmental impact of pet food
Pet food production is a significant part of the environmental impact of the food system. According to lobby group Eurogroup for Animals, global annual production of dry pet food alone contributes between 1.1% and 2.9% of all agricultural emissions.
Dog food in particular has been linked to very high emissions, significantly higher as a percentage of overall emissions than those of cat food.
One wide-ranging study used ingredient and nutrient labelling information to calculate the environmental impact of 996 dog food products sold in the UK, concluding that dog diets can sometimes have a greater environmental impact than those of their owners.
If a 20.1kg dog were fed on a diet of wet or raw food, for example, this would have a greater environmental impact than a human’s vegan diet.
If the UK’s consumption of dog food was reproduced globally, the paper concluded, it could be responsible for a carbon footprint equivalent to more than half (and up to 99%) of a year’s jet fuel emissions from the global aviation industry.
What this means for industry
How can the food industry respond? Well, in the case of dog food, its sustainability credentials often depend on the cut of meat.
The dog food study found that dog food products with the most linked emissions had a climate impact of 65 times that of the products with the least. The use of prime (high quality) meat that would otherwise be consumed by humans made the environmental impact much higher, whereas using nutritious carcass parts in low demand can mean lower associated emissions.
If the industry is looking to reduce the climate impact of its dog food, it could simply switch out wet and raw meat for dry.
Such a shift is important, because demand for sustainable pet food is not negligible. For example, in 2023 analytics company FMCG Gurus found that 42% of pet owners globally want to use more sustainable ingredients for their pets.
A later survey from Euromonitor revealed that 66% of pet owners are worried about the environment.
How industry is addressing sustainability in pet food
While underexplored compared to its human counterpart, sustainability in pet food is not an issue that has been entirely ignored. In fact, the food industry has responded to it in a number of different ways.
Some major companies, including ADM, Cargill, and Mars, are adopting regenerative agriculture in their pet nutrition supply chains, and incentivising farmers to develop pet food using regenerative agriculture.
There are also other routes than traditional meat in the pet food space.
For example, Meatly, the first and to date only cultivated meat company to receive regulatory approval in Europe, produces cell-cultivated pet food. This aims to avoid the climate impact of traditional meat production.
Furthermore, plant-based varieties of pet food also exist and have a lower climate impact, although they are currently not very widespread.
Solutions already exist, both to enable companies to fulfil climate targets at a production level and to appeal to sustainability-conscious pet owners. Nevertheless, the sector still has a long way to go when it comes to sustainability.
