Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar Bet, welcoming you to our webinar this evening, we're gonna be talking about a subject that's very close to my heart, pet food trends and sustainability. And we're very fortunate today to have Sean McCormack and Caroline Curtis on the line, both from Tales who are partnering with us on this event. I want to tell you a bit about both of them.
I'm, I'm sure that many of you will know Sean, great, friend of the webinar vet, having done many webinars for us, both on nutrition but also on his other passion of exotics and, and wildlife, conservation. Sean qualified as a veterinary surgeon from UCD in 2010. Has a keen interest in nutrition, animal welfare and conservation, and as I say early on in his career he spent er several years working very much with a exotics caseload.
But in 2016 he he took a slight other direction in taking on an industry role, what was then a very, very new company called Tails.com. This was very much talking about personalised nutrition for pets.
He continues to work for tails, but he also, a few years ago set up, the Ealing Wildlife Group, which is a community conservation group in West London, and he's been very involved in spearheading the reintroduction of Eurasian beavers to London. I think the first beavers in London for over 400 years, I was lucky enough to see them. Last June, er, which was a real thrill, and er.
We also see him popping up on things like Spring Watch and Autumn Watch, but you know, I'm sure you all have have seen him with the I think it was the stone curl used wasn't it? Corncrakes, corncrakes, corncrakes, that's right, up in up in Scotland, or Ireland, Ireland, Donegal, yeah, Donegal, yeah, no, it was brilliant watching that video as well. Caroline is operations director at Ts.com.
Which she helped to get, BC Corp certification for. She's responsible for overseeing the entire supply chain and operations, leading strategy from ingredient sourcing to customer delivery. Er Caroline's background is in as a manufacturing engineer, er, but she's also now the co-chair of the UK Pet Food Sustainability Committee.
I think this is an incredibly important area. Very excited to have you both on, and I'm gonna now sit back, turn off the video, and enjoy the talk. Over to you too.
Take care. Great. Thanks Anthony for the intro.
So there we are, there's the speakers for tonight. I won't, dwell on that because Anthony's done a good introduction. So thank you all first of all for joining, whether you're watching live tonight or whether you're watching the recording after.
I hope it is, something that adds value and it's enjoyable. And what we're going to cover, this evening are, kind of a broad picture of why sustainability matters in pet food and how feeding our pets, you know, can have a really, really big impact if we're mindful on it, you know, from a one health approach with people Planet. And animals.
And we'll cover a little bit on ingredients and animal welfare and why that's important and and how we can influence and those things. Also a bit on packaging and environmental impacts and really importantly, I think the part I most enjoy is a discussion and a Q&A after and I won't pretend to be the sustainability expert here. Caroline is, so there's a level of detail hopefully that you'll enjoy.
With that, but I'm just going to start by kind of talking about why sustainability matters before handing over to Caroline to talk about the in-depth detail. So, the estimates currently are that we have 38 million pets in Britain. Now that is a colossal number of mouths to feed on top of the, you know, growing human population.
Over 60% of UK homes have a pet. This is across the board. It's not just dogs we're looking at, but pets in general.
And how they're fed, of course, has a huge environmental impact, but it also has an animal welfare impact if we're feeding them animal products as well. So, why does this matter? Why does food matter in the food chain, food supply chain, have an impact?
Well, if you just look at the stats here, you can see the kind of emissions and the impact on the environment are really, really high from agriculture and food production. It's causing a lot of harm, the systems that we have kind of taken for granted and have been in place with intensification of agriculture and mass food production and unfortunately food waste as well, which we'll cover. This all has a really, really serious impact on the planet.
You can read for yourself there, you know, 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food. 50% of the world's habitable land is used for agriculture. 78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication, so nutrient overload is caused by agriculture, and, 70% of freshwater withdrawal, from, from rivers, lakes, ponds, and so on is for agriculture too.
So it has a huge, huge impact on the planet and, we're, as we all know, racing towards. Scary times and so some things need to change. So, another couple of stats that I thought were quite interesting, 73% of UK land used for agriculture, 85% of that is used for grazing or growing feed for animals, and, 22% of our total greenhouse gas gas emissions, 202019 figures were caused by the UK food system.
So it does matter. It's a huge impact and if we can improve anything, we have, you know, a long way to go and a huge amount of improvement that we could be making. So this, this slide kind of demonstrates something that I think shocks a lot of people.
If you ask, you know, about kind of feeding our pets, what's the biggest factor in feeding our pets in that whole supply chain from left to right, this is how, food is produced and treated, whether it's human or whether it's pet food. If you ask about like how can we be more sustainable in our eating choices, in our food choices. A lot of people will think about the later elements of the food supply chain.
So things like packaging, for example, how food is transported, and what happens to food afterwards in terms of waste and packaging afterwards in terms of waste as well. But actually, if you look at the first two, the left two bars there, we have UK ingredients and we have imports of food. So if you add those two up, we have 34 and 32%.
By my maths, that's 66%, 2/3 of the carbon emissions in the food supply chain come from ingredients. So really, really starting at the base of the, the bottom or the start of the food supply chain, that is where we can have most impact. That is what's causing most of the carbon emissions that are driving, driving climate change and, and the problems we're seeing there.
So if we can look at ingredients really first, then I think there's a huge scope to do, you know, really positive work in terms of being food suppliers, food manufacturers, and the packaging that 3%, I think, a lot of people are very, very surprised at that. We tend to focus on the things, tangible things that we have in our hands, have in our homes, buy off the shelves, I think that's what I can do to make my food choices more sustainable. But actually it's starting at looking at the supply chain from the beginning with ingredients.
Caroline is obviously going to go into a lot more detail next on that, but I just wanted to also kind of talk about the carbon paw print. We have this model, the carbon footprint for people, and, it tends to be referred to as the carbon paw print when we're talking about feeding our cats and dogs in particular. Now the jury is out on the exact kind of emissions for an average UK adult and there's, you know, varying figures out there.
But there's a very good study which I've included in further reading. I'll I'll share it with you at the end of the presentation, but a very good study from Petronelli et al. In Brazil and they looked at what kind of food dogs were fed.
And they worked out on average for an average size dog, so a 10 kg dog, little medium, small to medium dog fed traditional dry food or kibble would produce around 830 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. If they're fed wet food, so whether that's tins, trays, cans of food, or even the same kind of wet, meaty food home from home prepared diets, their emissions increase massively to 6500, over 6500 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. So a huge, huge increase from going from dry to wet or fresh, meaty kind of, foods.
And to give it some context, the kind of general agreed amount of carbon emissions for an average UK adult is about 10,000. Some studies are saying 7 to 8, some studies are saying 12 to 13, but if we said 10,000 is a pretty good middle of the road average as best as we can do. You'll see that, you know, a 10 kg dog can kind of creep up there and almost reach the equivalent of an adult human, which is quite shocking, depending on how you feed them.
And then it's also, I think, pertinent to say that, in the UK an average UK adult produces about double the world average. So we are a very, very expensive, lifestyle country in terms of how much carbon emission or carbon footprint we have. And so I'll hand over to Caroline to cover some of the finer detail on that and then come back later, for a discussion and Q&A.
So over to you, Caroline. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for a brilliant introduction.
So, you know, so we've got to talk about ingredients when it comes to food. It's the biggest part, 2/3, as, as Sean correctly said. And the impact of how you know, we produce that food and how we, how we grow it and what we do with it at the end, you know, at the end of the shelf life of it is also really important.
So if you wouldn't mind skipping on for me please, Sean, we, we should start by talking about kind of, you know, the particular role of pet food. Pet food is a component of that UK food and agri, you know, production system. And I think you know, just as pets have throughout history, shared scraps from a human's table, the pet food industry has a really long standing tradition of taking byproducts from the human food industry.
And you know, and pet food and the pet food industry has a role of transforming those food ingredients that humans won't eat into really delicious and nutritious food. That supports the UK farming system as a whole. It makes the best use of the precious resources that we have, and, you know, it helps provide commercial benefit for the farmers to kind of get more value out of all of that food that they're producing.
So the second point around the food waste hierarchy. So you probably have seen it, it's kind of like an upside down pyramid sort of shape. And it really describes how best to avoid the environmental impacts of .
You know, food waste on the environment and the first bit is always prevention. Try not to create waste food in the first place. But then trying to keep as much food in the food system as possible.
So, you know, diverting it to, you know, eating as much of it as possible, and, you know, don't waste any of the scraps. Humans first, then into animal feed, including pets, and then you kind of get into, OK, then if you are going to have food that you're not gonna eat, try and look at ways to. Use it, it, it by making it as fertilisers or, you know, trying to, trying to use it to for regenerative kind of means and then try and throw it away, at the bottom is the worst option.
And you know that shifting that focus to make sure as much food is consumed as possible is, is a really key focus for the pet food industry. And I think the pet food industry overall is pretty proud to be a contributor to that entire circularity business model when it comes to food, . But I, but I, but I don't think it's deniable that that byproducts part of it, is an area of myth and misconception, you know, we would say in the pet food industry these are really precious resources.
I don't like to call them byproducts actually, I like to call them co-products. They're often misunderstood. And you know, the role that I have in, in UK pet food, the.
A lot of the focus around what UK Pet Food does with consumers is to really try and provide education around some of those myths and misconceptions. So we'll talk a bit about that in the next, slides. But before we go into that, one of the things that UK Pet Food was really keen to do to kind of support the industry as a whole was to really deep dive into the, the most commonly used ingredients in pet food specifically for us.
And so they've partnered with an independent consultant called Three Keel. To commission research into these seven most commonly ingredients which are from an animal protein perspective, beef, poultry and fish, on a plant side, wheat, maize, rice and potato. And 3 keel looked at each of these ingredients through 5 metrics and you know, so.
Try and give a really broad idea of the the environmental impact of these ingredients. So not just to look at greenhouse gas emissions, but also to look at land use, deforestation impact, and then in terms of water, the amount of water use and also so the water quality. And before I go into this slide, I should say that this, the research used an economic allocation, methodology, which is really important from a pet food perspective because we don't just use muscle meat, right, from a, from a, from a cow or a, or a chicken, we'll use other byproducts as well.
So the economic allocation is a well regarded scientific. Methodology to apportion the impacts of climate through the relative value of the various parts of, of those animal and animal byproducts. So with that in mind, one thing I should say to start off with here is that, to give you a sense of scale and kind of impact, the total UK food and agri .
Sector is worth about 150 billion quid, a lot. Pet food is about 4 billion of that, so about 3% of the total impact. And here are some of the the, the findings from the research in terms of relative impact of the pet food industry compared to human food.
And I should say that, you know, so if you think about 3% of the overall kind of value impact. Some, in some areas, pet food punches below its sort of relative weight for its size, you know, in greenhouse gas emissions and land use, and water pollution impacts, for example. And, and that's really about that kind of byproducts aspects of it, right?
We, you know, a lot of the impacts has been borne by the primary reason that some of those, things have been. Grown and cultivated and so using some, you know, co-products really helps to make the most out of the impact that's already out there. But there are some areas, so for example, deforestation.
Where there are ingredients that have a really big impact. So, 30%, 34% of the soya that's embedded in UK pet food is associated with a very high deforestation risk, and that's because of the impact of deforestation to kind of grow soya in, in areas like the Brazilian rainforest. And you know, people are like, well, that's what, what, where, where is all this soy coming from?
So it's not just about the direct soy that goes into, into food, but it's also the embodied soy that's fed to animals in the supply chain. So I think that can be quite surprising for folks, to, to think about that. The other area where it's, you know, pet food kind of punches above its weight in the wrong way is around water consumption.
So 6% of the water used to produce food and drink, consumed in the UK is, you know, attributed to the pet food industry versus the 3% of the total value. And that's because of the kind of, you know, the relative mix within the products of, of, you know, lot, often a lot of high protein and some certain ingredients like rice which are very water intensive. So.
A few things to kind of bear in mind here. John, if you pop onto the next slide for me, please, thank you. So I'm gonna pull out a few of the key findings from, you know, the, the, that report that 33 keel generated for us.
I don't think it's gonna surprise anyone on this call, to note that animal ingredients have significantly higher environmental impact than plant ingredients. That's, I guess, not a surprise. What might be a surprise is that beef is the highest impact ingredient, like by far.
Way by far. It produces almost half of the total greenhouse gas emissions of all the ingredients we looked at and uses over 70% of the total land use. So it's a very intensive, you know, meat protein ingredient.
But there is a little bit of nuance in here, so muscle meat has the highest impact on that economic allocation perspective. With byproducts, you know, taking a lower share of the impact, and if you go back to that waste hierarchy. If meat is being produced or and wild meat is still being produced for human consumption.
Those byproducts are available, so it's, it's, it, it's it's a pretty good idea to try and use them for food birth. Potatoes, the humble potato is the lowest impact ingredient from a greenhouse gas, emissions and land use per calorie perspective. Well, one thing that I personally found really surprising was the impact of rice.
So, you know, rice, a plant-based material, it should be great, right? But it actually consumes more water than any other of the assessed ingredients. It's, you know, it's the way it's grown, the way it's processed.
And I, I found that personally very surprising. So. Ingredients is a really good place to start.
Right, when you're thinking about, you know, for food manufacturers and also consumers as well, when thinking about those mindful adjustments when you're selecting the products. But I will say that it's not super easy. Knowledge and balance here is key.
It is, I wish I could say it was like, you know, beef is bad, potatoes are great, we're all sorted. There are really trade-offs to consider for all ingredients. You know, animal proteins are a really great source of balanced nutrition.
They are available. They are really affordable. That's really important to bear in mind for a lot of consumers.
And they're delicious. Humans and pets enjoy eating them. And these are really important factors to, to take into consideration in the kind of overall.
You know, wide spectrum of things to consider, and, and, you know, and, and we didn't analyse all of the impacts possible in terms of the analysis we did purely from an environment perspective, so. On this slide here on the right are a few of the kind of key and obvious substitutions that can be made from a purely environmental perspective, and I'll talk through some of those and just highlight some of the trade-offs so that you've got them in mind. So the, I guess the most obvious one is red meat traded for something else, right?
You know, beef, beef is the best example, most impactful ingredient. You could trade it for white meat, chicken, it's a really common one, or beef traded to, to fish, so salmon. That's really good from an environmental perspective in terms of reducing the impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and land use.
However, the trade-offs, so poultry is also a very high water impact, ingredient, you know, in terms of usage and also eutrophication. And this embedded soil that we talked about before, you know, that, that can contribute to Amazonian rainforest deforestation, so. It's not, it's, it's not entirely straightforward.
Salmon again is a really high contributor to freshwater eutrophication, and I'd say for both poultry and salmon, you know, animal welfare is a consideration with both the substitutions, . Mussel meat to offal is a, is a pretty good switch, so, you know, beef being the best example. And it's that waste hierarchy thing again, right, if the animal's already been produced, let's try and eat as much of it as possible.
It's better to use up existing material before you drive demand for an alternative, you know, new product. The last one here is meat switch to plant protein. So, you know, I've just been switched for a potato, a humble potato again.
Switching entirely to plant-based proteins needs careful consideration from a nutritional point of view because is the full range of amino acids and fatty acids and minerals still available, for your pet to be completely healthy. Food supplementation is a solution to patch some of those gaps, but you know, supplements are a really greenhouse gas intensive material. You know, a lot of them are made in the Far East and China in very industrialised processes.
They have an environmental impact, so it's, so you've kind of got weigh up all of these things. And look, it's, it's really tricky. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say this is really straightforward.
It is quite tricky, but I think by, you know, through educating and just being a bit more mindful about the options that we've got, that's a good place to start. So the challenges here are, you know, we've got a growing global population and we've got a growing global population who wants more animal products and dairy. And so we definitely need innovation in this space and I totally welcome it, but I do wanna make a kind of representation here for animal byproducts or meat and animal derivatives.
Mm mm mm. Sounds so delicious. They are unromantic sounding, right, not touched by the brush of marketing.
And the, the reason that is, is because it's a really strict legal definition. You know, animal byproducts and meat and animal derivatives are sourced under really strict legislation, right? They're sourced strictly from animals that are passed as fit for human consumption.
And in the most part it's material that's diverted straight from a human food. We'll come on to plant those proteins later on. We will, you know, the, the, the, the material that's been diverted from human food processing plants is what can be classed as animal byproducts.
And, you know, what is this stuff in reality? So it's the majority of it is actually part of an animal that humans just won't eat, like offals. The other place it tends to come is, you know, parts of the animal that are surplus to the human food chain, and because it's, you know, it's a short shelf life product, if you know, if you can't sell it to market straight away, it, it rather than it go to waste, it can be diverted to animal byproduct.
So these products are chilled, can be chilled, or used fresh, straightened in, you know, animal feed processing. Or they can be processed, and, and rendered into their constituent parts. So be that dehydrated for meat meals or, separated into oils and fats or cooked into delicious gravies.
The reason to process these is really about making them more stable and and safe, you know, get rid of some of the pathogen risk about having that fresh material available, giving them a longer shelf life, which is again another way to reduce the waste of these products and make them very practical for use, in the pet food processing industry. These are really nutritious products. They're rich in vitamins and minerals.
B vitamins, iron and zinc, essential fatty acids, omega 3 and 6. They are very palatable and tasty, . And, and, you know, biologically appropriate, right, we talked about the the kind of rich history of, of pets as commensal animals to humans.
They are bits that we would have, you know, bits of an animal that we would have traditionally fed to our pets, back in yesteryear and even, you know, I'm not gonna go into dogs as wolves sort of territory, but, you know, they are, they are parts of the really rich and nutritious animal that, you know, scavenging animals would have kind of gone for first. So biologically appropriate, absolutely. But you know, purely from a sustainability perspective, using more of these byproducts is really great, makes environmental sense, and there's a lot of other benefits as well.
However, we talked about innovation, so let's go into that a bit. So . There are.
A whole bunch of different proteins and I'll go through them in a bit of detail here. So insect protein being something that is actually reasonably commonly seen now, not commonly seen, but it's already on shelves in the form of kibbles and treats. The most common species of insect that you.
Tend to see in pet food as black chalked soldier fly larvae and mealworms, but there's also things like crickets and other sorts of bugs. Insect protein, it's a good sustainability kind of choice. It's easily digested.
It's pretty nutrient dense. It's a good high quality protein. It's got healthy fats in it.
And from an environmental perspective, it typically uses much less land and water to produce, with lower greenhouse gas emissions. But you know, palatability, I should mention here, some pets can be really reluctant to eat it at first. And I think there is definitely like a squeamish k factor amongst consumers, right, you know, I, I wouldn't eat a bug.
I don't really want my pet to eat a bug. I'm kind of not really familiar with it. A challenge to insect protein is, is that availability of it.
It's still pretty niche, it's not mainstream yet, and it can be quite, quite expensive, so. Sometimes it's mixed with other proteins as well, so. Yeah, it an interesting alternative and it's definitely emergent.
The next one I'm gonna cover is plant-based diets. So there are many manufacturers now formulating complete diets for pets with a range of different plant-based proteins, peas, lentils, soy and potato, really common. To really try and meet that full nutritional need without me, .
But you know this trade-off point that I mentioned before to make sure that recipes are fully complete might require supplementation. We talked before about supplements being quite can can be very environmentally intensive ingredients. We talked already before about soy with this embedded soy aspect of Amazon forest rainforest deforestation.
So, so provenance can be, a challenge here. And, you know, there's a lot of genetically modified soy as well. So, you know, there's, there's not a load of organic European sourced soy, so, you know, try and get the right material you can feel really confident in can be tricky.
And a note here on the suitability of an entirely plant-based diet for different, different pets. So dogs as scavenging omnivores can digest and use both animal and plant-based ingredients, and their physiology can can adapt well to a carefully formulated vegetarian or vegan diet. But cats as obligate carnivores have really strict nutritional needs and you know, vegetarian or vegan diets, I would always say should only be considered with vet guidance.
And, and with all of these things, please be guided by your pet's health needs first and consult with the vet. It's a tricky area, make sure you get it right, . With all of these things, I, I kind of always bang on about the same points.
If you are gonna buy a formulated diet that is, you know, that that is novel or niche, make sure you do look for a reputable brands. Ideally a member of UK Pet Food, because you can have a certain level of, of confidence that they've been properly checked out. And you know, make sure that diet is complete and properly balanced and, and look for the evidence from the manufacturer to back it up.
Make the manufacturers do the work to prove it to you. The next one is around blended formulation, so this is kind of the flexitarian approach, which is. Yeah, a really robust way to.
You know, reduce that meat consumption, and, and it's suitable for some pet owners and also mirrors, I think what a lot of pet owners are actually doing with their own diets. It, it's a good approach. It, it combines traditional meat with alternative proteins and vegetables and, and is a good way of balancing kind of all of the benefits, nutrition, palatability and sustainability, .
As usual though. Kind of do your homework here, there is, I, I, I'd say working as a, you know, in the pet food manufacturing industry, formulation and getting nutrition right is really hard, really hard. As a, as a professional pet food manufacturer, you know, making sure that your ingredients and you know everything that's going into it, you can control.
It it is really tricky, and there is, and it's not very easy to get right, and there's a lot of interesting advice about how to prepare homemade diets. Virtually all studies show imbalances and deficiencies in home prepared diets, which, you know, I think reinforces that fact that formulation is not easy. If you are gonna do it, kind of really take care.
Thanks, Sean, and then we'll move on to cultivated meat and cell cultures. So, commonly known as lab grown proteins, lab grown meat. It's a really new and emergent industry, but UK and EU regulators have started to approve, you know, some specific products from some companies.
All pet food ingredients have to go through really rigorous safety testing and, and approvals to be used in pet foods. There have been some registrations for cell cultivated cells to be used as a raw material. The benefits here in terms of using cultivated meat are that no animals are involved in it, so from a welfare perspective, it's cruelty free.
And there's a kind of incredible bioengineering aspect of this which you can kind of, you can kind of tweak and adapt the nutritional profile based on kind of the inputs you put into it. Nutrition of cultivated meat is pretty similar to whatever the cell stock is used. It's it's pretty commonly chicken.
It's very adaptable to be used and because you know, no live animals are, are involved, it's antibiotic free. But it is a new technology, right, and the long term impacts of of, of, you know, pet health and the nutritional kind of impact of it is, is kind of just not known yet, that that scientific background is still not there. The nutritional profile and the composition of the meat does vary slightly from traditional meat products, and there is that challenge around kind of scalability of it.
It's still pretty niche. It can be quite hard to find, it's can be quite extensive still. And again, if you're gonna go there, look for a reputable manufacturer, from a brand you trust and buy from a store you trust.
It is also a highly processed, you know, it's a, it's a manufactured product, it's not natural, so for some consumers, that's a real consideration. And then lastly in terms of alternatives, so algae and yeast proteins are again emergent. We're starting to see them entering the market in supplements and treat niche treats forms.
There's some really great benefits in terms of digestibility, kind of gut health, I think is a is a claim and and some evidence to back that up with functional benefits as well. But they, you know, you're not just chomping on a bit of kelp. They are often really, you know, there's a level of, a kind of can be quite a high level of processing, so, so for them to make them suitable for use, in, in pet foods, and as they are again emergingt, kind of cost and availability can be an issue, if you're if you're thinking about switching to these.
So there's a really rap, you know, swift whistletop tour of some of the alternative ingredients here. And, and like Sean mentioned at the very start, you know, it, it ingredients is a huge area of impact. But we, let's touch on packaging now because it's an area that's really close to many consumers' hearts because of that tactical interaction a bit within the home.
And, you know, the challenges around pet food packaging in particular are really that. There's a lot of pet food packaging that is complex multilayer plastics, and you know, with a real consumer concern about rising plastic waste, it's forever material is always there like plastic particles have been found everywhere on Earth, you know, the deepest oceanic trench or in the, you know, in the stomach of the condor sailing high above the mountains. You know, it, it's kind of everywhere.
But I will make a shout out for packaging. If used responsibly, it's, it does have a really big part to play in reducing food waste and also food safety and you know keeping it, keeping products fresh and nutritious for longer. So There are innovation and developments happening in this space, which is really great.
There are increasing numbers of, you know, the, that complicated, very, you know, multilayer plastics are often used in things like retort pouches to get the kind of engineering benefits of of plastic being able to withstand heat and have really good shelf life. We're seeing those now switching into, you know, with research and development, recyclable monomaterials, monomaterials meaning it's just one kind of plastic, which means it's easier to recycle. There's a lot of work going that around lightweighting materials for use for packaging as well, so less material is used.
We're also seeing, I think, examples of refill and reuse trials, for different sorts of products. I think, you know, convenience is still a factor, but I think, thinking about ways to make sure that you don't just use packaging once is a really, is a really great, idea. And then compostable, you so you sometimes see, compostable options, they're pretty limited in use in terms of, .
Application and also kind of cost is prohibited in a lot of cases, but they, they do exist. And the third area where there's a lot of development across . Europe actually and and in the UK is around government policy to really drive funding and investment into collection and recycling systems for complex plastics.
So there's a, there's a lot of legislation rolling out across Europe which is called the extended producer responsibilities, which is really about you know, making manufacturers and packaging manufacturers pay for the waste that they're creating, to help fund that, that system. The other area that's under development is about mandatory recycling, labelling on the back of consumer packs to make it really easy for consumers to just pick up something and go, oh right, I can recycle this in this bin or I can't or whatever, so to, to try and keep the purity of those waste streams clear. So you'll see some of more changes like that coming out in future.
So we've talked about ingredients in the basket, we've talked about packaging, which is a smaller part, but which is really important for consumers. We should talk about kind of like all of the rest of the supply chain impact now because we can't really be complacent about any of it. And one big area to think about here is around that kind of in the what's called the scope one and scope two kind of impact, so manufacturing impacts, because the way that a product is made has has about as much environmental impact as as kind of what, what the ingredient is that you're choosing and so on.
So. There are 3 key areas I like to think about in terms of the manufacturing part of the supply chain. The first one's really about energy.
And here the focus is about saving energy or, you know, using energy that isn't from non-renewable source. So many UK manufacturers are now using 100% renewable energy to power their factories. It's pretty rare, you know, very good, renewable product mix in the UK, energy industry now.
And some manufacturers have taken it even further with, you know, generating their own energy, so whether that's solar panels on site or wind turbines, combined heat and power plants, biomass, all of that stuff is, is kind of great from a sort of energy resiliency perspective as well as a kind of climate change perspective. The second big area for manufacturers is about waste and waste reduction. A big milestone here is about achieving zero waste to landfill.
So any food waste that can't be used for consumption, rather than it going to landfill to divert it to anaerobic digestion, that's a kind of industrial fermentation process where you can generate biogas from waste foods, which is a great source. Again, it's a renewable energy source, helps wean us off some. More fossil fuels and stop it going from landfill.
And, and you know, the net impact of both of those things is really about reducing kind of the carbon impact. So by improving efficiency and reducing waste, it's a it's a real strong way for manufacturers to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions in the areas they directly control. And the UK pet food industry alongside the, the human food industry is really committed to moving, achieving net zero by 2050.
And manufacturing efficiencies are really central to that journey. So. Coming to the end of the sort of bits of information that I've got to share, but I think one thing I'd like to leave you with is, you know, someone comes in, client comes in and says, what steps can I take to be as sustainable as possible, you know, reiterating a few key points, the food is really important aspects of pets and being a sustainable pet owner.
So and a responsible pet owner. What, what are the kind of things that I should do and think about? So the first thing I will say is, you know, please, please, please, please think about balanced nutrition first.
Please lead with your pet's health. There's kind of no point switching to a really environmentally friendly diet if, you know, your pet won't eat it, first of all, and it makes your pet ill. So please think about nutrition first and really collaborate and consult with your vet to get this right.
It's super important. The second thing I'd say is you don't need to go bonkers. Like small steps really add up here and really nail the basics, because that has a huge impact.
So number one, don't waste food. Don't waste food. Do not overfeed your pets, please.
That's wasteful. Do not throw food away, you know, it's really important that your pets enjoy the food and they eat it all. As soon as you throw food away.
All of those upstream, you know, environmental impacts, it just makes you wanna cry, so don't throw it away. And consider flexing. Right, so you don't have to take all meat out entirely, even reducing meat consumption really has a big impact.
So that flexitarian diet, I'd advocate for humans have effects as well. And make some sustainable choices, so choose sustainable packaging, try and choose pack, you know, items that are packaged less. And then when you do have that packaging in your hands at home.
Recycle it really consciously, trying really hard to get it right, you know, no wish cycling, it's gotta be clean and dry, but I've gotta put it in the right bin. Get that right, that makes a big difference. And then the last one is transparency.
I've, we've put transparency here, but actually this is a random form of purchasing. So the biggest impact every consumer can have is with the pound that they've got in their hands to spend, right, and that's, and money really talks here. So if you can really be mindful and.
Go out there and look for sustainability commitments from brands and the companies that you're buying from. Look, look for their sustainability commitments, educate yourselves, use your trusted brands and retailers, and, and make brands do the work for you here, right, really ask high standards of them and really drive that change through the money that you're spending, and that has all of those things have a huge impact. So that's it from me, I'd just love to hear your feedback and thoughts and questions on this.
Yeah, thank you for that, Caroline. It's absolutely great. And before we just jump into questions, just a couple of little bits, from us.
There's further reading, there's some good papers and some good sources of information. I would highly recommend, UK Pet Food, website for some of the flyers and info sheets, fact sheets that are on there. You can download them, you can send them as PDFs to your clients if they're interested in certain things like, should I be feeding my, my pet a vegan food, for example.
So yeah, the other thing to say is that we are going to be coming back to vet shows this year, which I'm really excited about. We're going to be on stand at the British Vet Nurse Association Congress in Telford next month and at LVS in November. So if you do want to talk in more depth, please come along, myself and our vet nurse Amy will be there along with some others from the team.
And, also, this isn't our first webinar vet return this year. We're doing another webinar where we will get really into the detail and the evidence base around some of the myths and misconceptions, in pet food trends. So, I won't shy away from talking about the controversial topics like raw feeding and, and, .
Vegan cats, which no doubt will come up in the questions here. So yeah, we're open to the floor. I think Anthony, I saw a couple of questions come in in the comments.
So if you do want to ask a question, just pop them in the chat box and hopefully we've got, you know, 15 minutes or so to to chat through them. Sean and Caroline, thank you so much, that was really, really interesting, and I've probably got a few questions as well, but we'll let the, the floor go first. So Susan's saying, where does egg protein fit into the 3 kiel stats?
It's not one that we looked at, just in terms of we, we, we had to kind of draw the line somewhere. Egg protein is again very readily available, it has a high, it has a level of processing, but it's generally, you know, used in relatively small amounts. So, you know, as part of an overall, kind of portfolio of things that are there and available.
It's, it's definitely one to consider, but, not as impactful as some of the other meat proteins. It was interesting just as er and aside from that Caroline . We had one of our green discussion forums, Per Larsson who er works for a Swedish company called Ragnarcells and they've managed to be able to take out the nitrogen and phosphates from water so that it can be recycled and obviously we know that in certain areas where there's intensive chicken production, that obviously these The these compounds end up in rivers from the chicken manure and so on, but their problem has been that you can't actually, when you recycle that er nitrogen and phosphate, particularly the phosphate to use as chicken food, the, the er EU won't allow it to be used because it's come from, from faeces, so circularity really working well.
The other comment he made from that was, you know, why are, why are eggs now so expensive because phosphate is so expensive to farm, isn't it, so er, this is where I think you were saying sometimes it's, it's government changes that we need as well, isn't it, it's legal changes to be able to, To to use those things and to be thinking, you know, circularly all the time. Yeah, absolutely. Cos it it is a really nice protein, I, I think other work was done on eggs in, in the developing world and that will really help with children, you know, not getting stunting and things so it's a, it is a great protein but obviously we don't, I don't think it's a common protein.
To put into pet food anyway, is it? It's used quite a bit in some of the kind of clinical prescription hypoallergenic diets and things like that as a as a novel protein, sometimes, but used a lot more in the human food chain I think than pets, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think we've got another question that was on the chat, let me just see, chicken to potato, Julie was saying, I think you had a slide where you said you know changing chicken to potato, what what's, are we seeing more potato based diets? I, I think it's, again, it's one of the challenges with potato and, and plant-based proteins is actually around kind of processability and, you know, so, so this is what I mean when it can be quite complicated to think about some of these switches.
So, the, the potato protein is, is used in some diets, but using too much, but it can make it quite difficult to handle and quite make it, you know, create a level of waste in terms of processing it, so it's not super straightforward, . But yeah, thinking about how, how, how ingredient is also impacting the kind of manufacturability of it is, is also one of those other considerations which we kind of didn't get into here because there are many trade-offs with a lot of these different ingredients. Yeah, and I think one of the interesting things with the kind of .
Plant-based trend is, it's quite difficult, as Caroline said, to manufacture with some of those plant-based. We look at like peas and beans and things, you know, they have got anti-nutritional factors that need to be kind of cooked out or taken out of them in order to get them bioavailable to the animal that's consuming them on the other side. So it's all well and good to say we can formulate, you know, a plant-based diet using pea protein and potato and certain other things, but, sometimes the bioavailability of those products also really needs to be looked at.
And the other thing to say is with some of, especially with the novel diets and novel proteins, certainly with, you know, feeding cats, for example, plant-based diet entirely. We don't have longitudinal studies on the health of those animals into their teens and twenties yet because these are new foods. The same with insect protein, you know, we can see actually that some of the insects, black soldier fly in particular, you know, has a really, really good complement of the essential amino acids for dogs, but do we have any longitudinal studies on, you know, long term health outcomes and things.
And then as well, I think it's important to say that a lot of the scientific evidence, and we'll get into this in the next webinar in more detail, but a lot of the scientific evidence kind of relies a lot on owner-reported data, and I think if people, the cohort of pet owners who are being daring and, and, you know, being kind of innovative with how they feed their pets. There is an unconscious, sometimes conscious bias to say my pet is healthier on this diet that I'm committing to because I truly believe in it, you know, there's a kind of a placebo or bias there. Yeah, so, the, the one big study that came out and caused, you know, a lot of discussion in the veterinary space, last year was an owner reported study where they said that, vegetarian and vegan.
Fed dogs and cats, had fewer vet visits and less health problems and were healthier. That was the conclusion and actually, Owner reported data, my pet is healthier or I don't trust the veterinary industry, therefore I'm not bringing my pet because I'm a holistic type owner that is naturopathic. You know, there's a lot of factors there that can result in a study that gets the headlines, but isn't actually quite what's happening, you know.
Yeah, no, absolutely, that's a really good point. Just while, obviously there are a few more questions coming in, but it'd be really interesting to know where people are listening in from, you know, from UK or or further afield, and what you do if you're a vet and nurse or if you're involved in the, in the food industry or, or whatever, so if you'd like to put some of those down, it's always interesting to hear. Where people are coming from, and India asked a really interesting question, are there reliable brands or studies that consumers can reference when making choices, I suppose this is the, the big question about, it's very easy to put on your or, it's not easy but people do it, you know, this is a sustainable dog food, er, it's quite a woolly term isn't it, so I think greenwashing, green hushing, you know, in equal measures can be a problem, I, I can see why.
Pet food companies don't want to put anything down er because they can be shot down, can't they very easily. Yeah, yeah, it, and it, and I think you know, we talked about myth and misconception, you know, the reality is there's just a lot of different voices out there in that space. It's really hard to know where to trust.
It can be quite a tricky and complicated and quite a scientific area, right? Nutrition is complicated, thinking about processing is complicated and and there's such a kind of plethora of, of ways that you can kind of get information. You're actually wading through what's a trusted information source can be really hard.
I will, I will definitely kind of, you know, put my hand up to advocate UK pet food is a really good source for this, you know, it, it represents, you know, it tries to represent the, the, the complications of, of pet food navigating that from a consumer perspective. Represents, you know, many different sorts of feeding, so it's a good source, I think, of, you know, it's a good place to start. You know, nutrition is a, is a tricky area.
I think if you're thinking about switching your diet, I would, we would always advocate speaking to your vet first, be be led by nutrition first and foremost, and be led by the science and seek it out. The, the other thing I would say as well is, you know, it's a, it's a crowded market in some ways like myself and Caroline I have been at Tails.com 10 years nearly for me and .
There's been a huge surge in, you know, startups, pop-ups, new brands, all kind of clamouring for a segment of the market. And the one thing I would say, you know, if you're talking to your clients, or even putting out, you know, proactively on kind of pet pet nutrition advice, avoid brands, I would say that use negative marketing. Because a lot of where the myths and misconceptions come from is this crowded marketplace and we want to be kind of selling our wares and we're gonna like denigrate everyone else and say that traditional pet food is killing our pets when actually the nutrition of our pets has really, really gone up in quality and expertise in science over the last few decades or 60, 70 years even.
Pets are probably living longer because their nutrition has got better, and pets, especially in, you know, pedigree, dog and cat world, a lot of the health conditions we all know as vets are due to genetics and line breeding and, and we're breeding disease into our pets, you know, by accident or, or by design kind of subconsciously. So yeah, I would say trying to avoid brands that don't really have the proof or anything to say about how good their product is and why, but they're just saying that, you know, Kibble is like McDonald's or, you know, big pet food is killing our pets or vets are in it. With big pet food to make pets sicker because they stand to profit from it.
We see all of these messages out on social media and I think certain brands of pet food, jumping in on that and stoking those, those embers and kind of sowing mistrust and And also guilting pet owners sometimes into, you're not a good pet owner unless you feed only chicken breasts and human style foods to your to your pet when actually we know that's not a sustainable way to feed. And I always say, you know, dogs don't need fillet steak, but we shouldn't be feeding them fillet steak, you know, with what with what's out there in the in the human food chain of delicious, nutritious food. I put in the line about the biologically appropriate.
It's, it's often said this is biologically appropriate if it's raw bits of animal fed in a bowl raw to a dog, but the same ingredients, if we use it to cook it, give it a shelf life, make it safer, suddenly it's processed junk. So I'd like to say as well that, you know, processing isn't a dirty word. Every pet food is processed to some degree.
Yeah, yeah, and I would, you know, as a person who's worked in the food industry for, for many years, you know, processing sounds like this horrible, scary thing, but we do processing in our own homes all the time. The type type of processing we most commonly see is, is like cooking. It's baking, it's mixing things together, it's maybe grinding things up.
You know, it's not some sort of scary. I don't know, which is cauldron of nasty chemicals bubbling out of it, you know, these, these are processes which have been used by us to make foods bioavailable, to make them more stable, to increase the shelf life. All the food that we grow in fields is seasonal.
And that, you know, the, the ability to kind of make that food available for longer periods of the year and make it affordable and accessible, is, is a really important part where kind of, you know, the processing comes into it. So, yeah, not all processing is bad. There are obviously shades of processing and what's good processing.
I think one of the things that I do find frustrating is, . A belief that plant-based products are healthier because they're plant-based. That's not always true if they're, you know, a very ultra processed, kind of component that has, has required multiple processing steps to turn it into something that looks like a chicken nugget.
So I'm just, yeah, I think it's, it is about education and it, Sean makes a really good point which is, it's, it's really hard to navigate through these things. If, if you're being persuaded negatively a particular way, always ask yourself the question, is, is there a product on sale here? I think that's often a good way to just kind of consider the viewpoint that someone's presenting a particular view.
I think you've both made the point, and it, it's a really good point, which is, as you get a little bit older and wiser, you realise that there's, there's shades of grey, and actually, you know, there usually isn't a black and white answer because. I think as you've been intimating there, you know, if, if you've got a plant based diet that's mainly made of soya that's come from Brazil and is destroying the rainforest as opposed to maybe a beef diet that's coming from a, an animal that's been grazed on, on you know, on pasture and has actually enriched that pasture, it's a, it's got a lot of wildflowers on it, that's probably better. You know, we can be obsessed with carbon as well, can't we, so we need to look at things in a holistic way where nature, animal welfare, carbon, packaging, all of these things come together, but actually just by using the byproduct of the animal, a lot of food is wasted.
If we can prevent waste, that's massive. Yeah, I made a note there when Caroline was talking about the switch to salmon, for example, and she mentioned that, you know, the, the impact of farmed salmon on wild salmon stocks and fish lice and disease risk to wild fish species and ecosystems and health, you know, the, the impact of this, you know, binary thinking of like, you know, plant-based good, meat is bad, actually doesn't take into account plant monocultures. Are far less biodiverse than a mixed farming approach that is kind of a circular economy, and using animal inputs or animal outputs, excrement as plant fertiliser and you know, so there's never, there's never really a black and white answer on some of these things and I think social media is sort of A bit of a a negative impact sometimes on just saying this is good, this is bad, and guilting pet owners as well.
I think convenience also isn't a dirty word when it comes to pet food. Giving people convenient, affordable, healthy, complete and balanced diets, that's fine, you know, but there's a lot of marketing that kind of says, oh, you're a terrible pet owner if you feed traditional pet food. You know, these are some of the issues, these kind of binary issues that I, I think don't help, you know, either side, that we discussed at the Bethany Green discussion forum, so I know, some of you may have been on that before, we do that at a nature reserve.
The last 3 years we're in the UK this year it was actually in the south of France, it's gonna be in the south of France next year, the 3rd and 4th of June. So if any of you are interested in coming to that, obviously. Email the webinar that and we can certainly send you more information about that as well and, We've got still some more questions, we've got people listening in from all over, we've got er somebody listening in from South Africa.
Bristol, the UK, er, Edinburgh. So people listening in from quite a few places, Julie's saying plant-based proteins have high carbon and energy impact in their life cycle assessments too, she believes, so as you say that there can be a carbon impact there as well, the, the only problem, Caroline, with webinars is you don't hear the tumultuous applause when you finished speaking, er, which is a, Bit of a, a negative, but Veronica has said thank you for the interesting talk, it has raised my awareness about aspects I have not thought about. Do you have a good, suggestion for a starting point for clients to research this themselves?
I find that most want us to give them the information, but there are too many aspects to cover in a consultation, I think you are. Saying the UK pet food is a good website to to go to, isn't it? Yeah, there's fact sheets on pretty much every single kind of food diet you can imagine, and, and, and as we, you know, we really work to try and help explode some of the myths and, and.
Try and make it accessible, so you do start there and UK Petfield are always really happy to hear from you and and if you have any queries, just, just email them, their website, you know, the website has a link and definitely get in touch with you. They're great one pagers just to have on file in your vet practise that you can attach an email, PDFs of whatever topic, one page useful advice, yeah. I think fundamentalism in this is always, you know, if, if you say it's gotta be meat or it's gotta be er plant, you know, there, there's a mixture in there, isn't there, of, of opinions.
And Berges is greet greetings from Germany, it was very interesting. Er Julie, thanks so much, really useful advice and information. Er let's see if there are any other.
Questions, just on the question and answer as well, has anyone studied the CO2 generated from freezers full of raw pet food? That's from Susan. Oh, yes, that's a good one.
Yes, I mean, look, chill chain, frozen chain has its own, you know, the study that we did with 3 kel just looked at the ingredient, but it didn't look at all the supply chain impact, so yeah, it's something that's really interesting. I'm, I, I wonder if there's that study is out there. I'll have a dig around.
And then Beth has said, what would recommended, what would you recommend replacing rice with when we are recommending a bland diet? To our GI post op cases. And look, and, and the the the I think those three points I left at the end, I really mean it.
Being led by the nutrition first, like being mindful about the ingredients. If there's a reason to use it, then that's, you know, and because of nutritional, you know, sensitivity. I think that's justified.
It's when things are mindlessly used without real care and consideration for the, for the impact of it is, is where it gets problematic. So you know. So carrying on with the rice, you know, we've got rice at home, we can boil it up, we had a bit of chicken in, feeding that sort of diet for 2 or 3 days is, is, is never going to cause a problem from a balanced perspective, is it, it's, but if you were feeding it for months and months, it probably would.
Yeah, well, Anthony, I think there's some evidence coming out to say that it's a little bit outdated and actually it, it is missing some important nutrients and it's much better for the gut wall even. To be getting, all of the nutrients that an animal needs when it's sick. So there's a steer away from actually feeding it, you know, what we traditionally call a bland diet of chicken and boiled chicken and rice, to actually feed a complete diet, but in like, you know, smaller amounts if your pet's stomach's upset or, you know, maybe a simpler ingredient list, but try and complete feed complete and balanced dietary illness as well.
Even day, you know, for a couple of days, and there's some really good prescription diets for, you know, intestinal disease, diets aren't there that we can use, yeah, for sure, yeah. Indi saying thank you for the informative talk from Belgium, brilliant, I think that might be all the questions, I mean we could go on and on, I, I suppose. I, I kind of wanna briefly bring in insect proteins because again it sounds like it should be really circular and using food waste, but I think again it's from an EU perspective they can't just use food waste, so often they are then using good quality food to actually feed the insects, so it's not quite as circular as we think is it?
No, it's not. And, currently, correct me if I'm wrong, Caroline, but I don't think there's any large scale insect protein producer in the UK. It's all coming in from Europe.
So, what you're technically saving maybe in, you know, carbon emissions or water use, land use, you might be just adding then your kind of transportation and energy costs to get it here, and it's super expensive because of that. It's, it's not, not in abundant supply. And the, the thing I was going to say, which I think we can all just kind of like miss the point on, but it's, it's useful to talk about is obesity.
You know, pet obesity is a massive driver, we all know in the veterinary space what a driver it is for poor welfare, poor quality of life, but also, you know, comorbidities for other diseases and exacerbated by obesity. But thinking about obesity as a food waste issue, like Caroline was talking about, that often gets missed. And actually I think, you know, we talk all the time about tails.com about weight control, the biggest, the most fundamental thing you can do and the system we've designed to take an individual dog's weight, body condition score, lifestyle factors, other foods, and give them a bespoke feeding.
The idea there is to keep them at the ideal weight that will give them a healthier, happier, longer life. I think we also maybe could frame that as vets, you know, and vet nurses to say, you know, it's really, really, if you want to be a sustainable, responsible pet owner, even for the planet, not overfeeding your pet is going to really help the planet as well as your pet. Massively.
And of course we talk about malnourishment, often we think about. You know, very thin individuals, but if you're overweight, that's also a form of malnourishment, but obviously as you say, if you're feeding more food then there's less to go around, so feeding the right amount it just makes sense, you can feed more animals, er by doing that, can't you? Yeah, yeah.
Beth is saying amazing, thank you so much from South Wales. Karen is saying love this. I'm finding my interest really developing around nutrition and supporting clients with choices.
I'm looking forward to the next webinar on myths and misconceptions. I think that's a great place, place to finish and er Suzanne just says see you at BVNA congress. Yeah, I can't wait.
We've been busy organising it and we're just very happy to be back into, you know, the veterinary congress space and talking to everyone on the ground. So come see us on, on stand at BVNA or LBS. Hm.
Sean, Caroline, really great webinar. I don't know whether I'll make the 21st cos it's my wedding anniversary, so if I'm on live I might be in trouble. But I will, I will listen, post, post webinar.
But thank you so much, this is such an important area. I keep on saying you can't run a veterinary practise if there's no planet. So sustainability is massive.
Sean, you know how much I love what you're doing with the, the, the beavers, I would say to people if they're down London way, er, do go on one of er Sean's beaver safaris as well, it's they're not guaranteed views, but it's a great experience to go down and er I was lucky enough to see them when I did go down last June. Yeah, a bit of a plug there for the Ealing beaver project, yeah, just at the end, we love, we love the beavers, and if you're not following Sean's Instagram, there were, there were two beavers having a play fight the other night, so it's it's entertaining beavers, peregrine falcons, if you're a lover of nature. Get onto Sean's Instagram feed as well.
It might be off the point a bit, but I felt it was necessary. Thank you for the plug, Anthony, yeah, they make a surprising, surprisingly cute noise when they're wrestling together, don't they? Yeah, they definitely do.
And Caroline, great to meet you and thank you for the film. Oh pleasure, thank you for inviting us. Cheers, take care, thanks everyone everyone.
Thanks for listening and see you soon, take care, bye bye, bye.
