EPISODE 110: How realistic is sustainability in pet food today?

Lindsay Beaton: Hello, and welcome to Trending: Pet Food, the industry podcast where we cover all the latest hot topics and trends in pet food. I'm your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, Lindsay Beaton, and I'm here live on stage at Petfood Forum 2026 for a special episode on sustainability in the pet space.

I have three guests with me, perfect to cover today's topic. In case you're unfamiliar with them, here's what you need to know.

Jim Lamancusa is the CEO of the Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC), where he leads the global effort to advance environmental and social responsibility across the pet industry. With more than 25 years of experience in the consumer packaged goods sector, Lamancusa has worked across a wide range of industries as a founder and entrepreneur and as a leader of global sales and marketing teams.

Dr. Ann Marie Ocker is the technical marketing and innovation director at International Ingredient Corporation (IIC), where she bridges scientific expertise with strategic market development. In this role, she drives innovation and growth in pet food markets in the United States and abroad. With almost 20 years of experience in food science and chemistry, Ocker's career includes academic research and commercial applications, focusing on ingredient innovation and formulation strategies for both human food and pet food products.

Amber Stone serves as the corporate sales executive at Envita Solutions. In her role, Stone partners with manufacturers, particularly within the food and beverage industry, to develop and implement comprehensive waste and sustainability strategies aligned with operational, regulatory and business goals. She works closely with cross-functional teams to assess complex waste streams, identify risk and cost-reduction opportunities, and deliver scalable solutions across manufacturing and distribution environments.

This panel's wide-ranging experience in the various aspects and implications of sustainability makes them the perfect people to answer this question: How are the idealism and realism of sustainability in pet interacting in the current environment?

I want to start today's episode by talking about your different perspectives on sustainability. What do you think sustainability looks like right now in pet food?

Jim Lamancusa, CEO of the Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC): Sustainability is a broad umbrella, and there can be misconceptions from both consumers and industry about which areas of sustainability are most important and impactful. Unfortunately, there's no one easy answer — it really depends on what you can do as an organization. As for where sustainability stands within the industry, I'd say the pet industry is behind the human industry. 

We typically see more organic foods and more recyclable packaging on the human side. However, there's a huge upswing in consumer awareness around sustainability for pets. Pet parents actually over-index in purchasing behavior for sustainable products versus people who don't have pets. It's more important for companies in the pet industry to embrace sustainability as a core business value than they currently do. We're a little behind, but it's coming quickly, and it's the consumers driving the behavior.

Beaton: Ann Marie, you have experience in both the human and pet space. What are you seeing that correlates with that?

Ann Marie Ocker, technical marketing and innovation director at International Ingredient Corporation (IIC): I'd agree with a lot of that. With human food, it's been a practice to look into for much longer, and the question is how do we do that in pet? Some parts of the industry are already sustainable, like rendering and using parts that go into a pet food system rather than a human food system. What's interesting now, working with International Ingredient Corporation, is that their business model for 52 years has been upcycling from the human food stream into the pet food stream. It seems so simple. 

Our products go into pet food systems as a flavor enhancer, for palatability and things of that nature, and I've been pushing that with our customers: Do you understand where this ingredient actually came from, or the value of this ingredient in our food system, and how it came to be? This isn't just an ingredient — it's something that didn't go into a waste stream. It's a value-added nutritional product we were able to pull from the human food system that wasn't desirable or was mispackaged and couldn't be resold. It could be so much bigger, and I think it's going there, but it's lacking in the pet industry. We could do a lot more with what we already have.

Amber Stone, orporate sales executive at Envita Solutions: I'd echo a couple of things you both touched on. One opportunity starts at the beginning, but it's also about what you do with the end result. If you're looking at sustainable pathways for the byproducts you're generating, that includes donation activities, which a lot of people shy away from because they're nervous about what happens to the product once it gets out there. 

There are legal protections — the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act — and there are tax deductions available for donation-based activities. Above that, prioritizing moving materials to a higher, better use when they can't go toward their intended purpose really compounds impact. When you can influence packaging design on the front end to prevent material from becoming waste, you can reduce what enters a landfill. 

There are a lot of challenges. With greenwashing, having a package design that doesn't have a proven outlet or consumer education around where to recycle the material is something we can address. There are opportunities like refillable packaging design, and novel proteins — black soldier fly, fish proteins, the alternative proteins available for pets with allergy concerns. There are a lot of options, and it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. 

It's also important to give people who are early in their sustainability journey some grace. A lot of people scrutinize those who are just starting, but giving them grace as they go through trial and error goes a long way. It's a community, we know better than ever, and the more we work together, the better the sustainability outlook looks for everybody in the industry.

Beaton: One thing that's already apparent, just in the five minutes we've been talking, is that the conversation has gone so much more in-depth over the years than reduce, reuse, recycle — the stuff I grew up on as an elder millennial. When it comes to an industry as multifaceted as pet, it's a nuanced conversation, and a different one depending on which segment you're talking to. What are those conversations looking like in the industry, and how do companies figure out which part of the conversation they're supposed to be in?

Stone: A great place to start is baselining where you are in your sustainability journey. Look at where you can make the biggest impact — energy audits, water audits, your scope emissions — to pinpoint where your biggest generation is happening and where the biggest opportunities for improvement are, so you can really dial in. 

The same goes for waste. When you look across your enterprise, you can say, "This is my biggest landfill generator," or "This site has a really big issue with plastics," and start to make an impact there. Baselining is a great place to start.

Lamancusa: That's a great point, Amber. We've found the same thing — benchmarking and baselining is the most important thing. But in the pet food industry, there isn't a lot of expertise around sustainability in general, so we created a tool at the Pet Sustainability Coalition called our Benchmark Assessment. It's free for the entire industry; you don't have to be a member. It takes you through all the different areas of impact and then produces the top three to five things you could do as a business as a starting point. 

There's another term, if you're a sustainability professional, called a materiality assessment. I don't love the term, because materiality means what's most material for your business, not the materials you use. A materiality assessment is an in-depth process where you conduct stakeholder interviews with your customers, suppliers, retailers, distributors, employees and shareholders, and you find the most material areas of sustainability for your business. That helps build a three- to five-year strategy. That's the best place to start. But there's also a "materiality light" — that Benchmark Assessment any company can take. Any employee can help do it, and you'll get a baseline of where you are.

Ocker: I'd absolutely agree. Find where you are today and what small things you can begin to do that make sense. Because we sell ingredients, some of our customers have come back and asked how we got to the emissions numbers we calculated for our process. And it's not just domestic — foreign markets are coming and asking about that information on our ingredients too. That's a very positive sign that this is spreading in different directions. Do what you can, but first figure out where you are, so you know where to start.

Stone: I'll add one other thing. One of the biggest impact drivers and motivators is starting with your people. Everybody tries to look in all these other places, but the people at your plants know your product and process best. If you have a good food safety plan in place and your food safety teams are engaged, quality, food safety and sustainability tie together well, because a lot of waste decisions spin off from quality decisions. 

Having decision trees in place — if A is wrong with my product, it goes to B — and a waste partner aligned with that is something we see a lot in our work. It's also about shifting from reactive to proactive: recall management plans and having someone in place, because in an emergency you're just trying to get the product out of there. If you have a proactive plan and aligned partners, you'll find a lot more success with your sustainability strategy. Incentivizing people to make the right choices is another good approach. That data and baseline is a really good motivator. It's actually quite entertaining to see the competition between sites — I love it. A good, healthy competition and incentivizing folks is a great motivator in sustainability.

Beaton: And it's underutilized, I think. I'm curious what you all think about motivation and messaging when it comes to sustainability. If you're a brand, you're listening to consumers and what they think of sustainability. But if you're an ingredient supplier or an equipment manufacturer, your sustainability journey might not look as sexy — it's somewhere in the manufacturing process, and you have to do what makes sense and deal with what you're working with. 

Are companies asking for help with that kind of messaging? Are they coming to you already committed to the sustainability journey, or do you often get questions from people who want to get their company on board but find it more difficult to get the messaging across because they're not consumer-facing? What does that look like at different points in the stream?

Lamancusa: I get the question a lot: If we're not fully embracing sustainability, can we join a coalition like PSC? What we tell them is that we're an inclusive community — we want everybody at the table. We do have an accreditation program for companies that are really committed and want to truly market it, and there's rigor that goes along with it. But everybody is asking for sustainability at certain places. 

Many medium and large brands have specific targets they've already communicated to their consumers — carbon emission reductions, for example. There's only so much you can do as a company yourself; you have to work within your supply chain. Anywhere up to 95% of emissions come from who you buy from, either upstream, or how you dispose of it downstream. So for a company that has set a carbon emission reduction goal for 2030, you have to work within the supply chain to do it. 

A lot of the companies here at Petfood Forum, even though they may not be dealing with a direct consumer, have customers — the pet food brands — saying, "I need you to reduce your emissions so I can claim that to my customers as part of the entire supply chain."

Beaton: What are you all experiencing as companies within the supply chain?

Ocker: Some of our customers who manufacture the end product have come and asked us — they're doing their upstream work, and their Scope 3 is to us. They get the information about our emissions and what we've calculated: pounds correlated to how many cars we've taken off the road, or how many houses' worth of electricity for a year our upcycling work equates to. That's a customer doing their due diligence on the upstream for a single ingredient, or maybe two or three ingredients in their formulation. They're trying to do this on all their ingredients to understand their product as well as possible. 

For us, it's about looking at our ingredients and our sources from the human industry — the co-products deemed unusable or less desirable for humans. It's still human food; we just divert it before it goes into a waste stream. It's very valuable, usable nutrition. But you're right that, from an ingredient supplier, the messaging maybe isn't as sexy. 

My thing with some of the messaging out there is: don't market on it just to market on it. Market on it and back it up. If somebody asks, "What are your numbers? How did you get to this?" you need to understand where it came from. If times get tough and that marketing message goes away, were they really doing it? Because if it's what you're doing, it's there all the time.

Stone: I'd agree with the data piece. When we manage our customers' total waste portfolio, we capture all of that data as part of our package to them. As you all know, if you're in the human or pet food manufacturing space, you have your own keywords for what you call waste, and everyone calls things by different words — we see that across all manufacturing segments. 

We can tie those tags to the waste streams when we put it in our data system, so it speaks your language. When you're reporting out on your sustainability reporting, you can put your money where your mouth is. You have that evidence out there for people to see: "We've really invested in this, and we have the data to back it up." That speaks volumes.

Beaton: One thing becoming more apparent as the industry travels further in the sustainability journey is that there are a lot of challenges inherent in the ideal version of sustainability versus what's realistic right now — and what might be realistic five years from now. It might change from ecosystem to ecosystem within a business too. 

What are some of the challenges you're seeing, and what does the industry need to do to face them head-on and get to the next step?

Lamancusa: Great question. There are a lot of things we need to do as an industry, from carbon emission reductions to ingredient sourcing, regenerative agriculture and the plastic packaging we're using. It goes back to what you can do as a company most effectively. 

The entire industry doesn't need to do one single thing, but there are several things that would make a big difference. Carbon emission reductions are one of the things consumers most identify with, so having a publicly stated carbon emission reduction strategy is really important. 

Specific to the pet food industry, one of the most worrying trends over the past five years is the push toward human-grade pet food and competing with the human supply chain — using chicken breasts and steak to feed pets when there's the other half of the animal that's extremely nutritious and perfect for pet food. It somehow became demonized. We're trying to educate the industry. 

There's the term greenwashing, and then there's greenhushing — being too quiet about the things you do. We're encouraging companies to "green shout." You should be proud if you're using the other half of the animal, because it's extremely nutritious for pets and better for the planet. In America, pets consume 30% of the proteins raised in the country, so if we suddenly switched to only chicken breast and steak for pets, there would be a massive amount of waste in the stream — and it's actually not nutritious for the pet. They need a well-balanced diet. 

I joke that if your dog went out and caught a chicken, it wouldn't just eat the chicken breast — it would eat the whole thing, because that's actually really healthy for it. We're trying to educate pet brands not to be afraid of communicating whole-animal utilization and upcycling. 

The last thing is packaging. It's a little technical, but there's a lot of multi-material packaging — a mixture of polyethylene and polypropylene. When you mix those two, it's impossible to recycle. If you use just polyethylene, even multiple layers of it, it can be recycled effectively. The problem is we have a mixture in the industry of brands using blends and brands using just polyethylene. If the entire industry moved toward that mono-material, it would make curbside recycling of our flexible plastic packaging possible.

Ocker: I think it's about education — educating that upcycled is not recycled waste. Upcycled is simply reclaimed before it goes to waste. I was thinking the same thing about the human industry. I've worked in the meat, the protein, part of the industry, and every part is used. If some of those parts stopped being used because what we feed our pets is changing, there's so much that could be wasted. 

The rendering industry is doing a great job, but it's that balance of what goes into pet versus human. Trust me, I cook meals for my pet myself — I'm all for them eating some human food — but you have to have complete and balanced nutrition, and there's nutritional value I can't give them. As long as the foods meet those specs, it's great. But there's competition with the human industry. There are organ meats Americans don't consume — it's not even a delicacy; we would not eat that — but it makes sense for the pet to eat it or to have it used in the food. 

Educating people that upcycled ingredients really do have great nutritional value, and that it's okay to use them, is key. I help our customers position that in their products for their marketing, but it's also been an education for them to look at themselves as a whole. They're realizing things about their own systems and how they can make improvements by starting slowly and understanding one piece at a time.

Stone: I'd say acknowledge what's holding you back. Is it a small sustainability team? Do you not have the resources? There are so many great organizations out there — some of us are sitting right here — that will be more than happy to help you figure out where to start. Get a baseline. Maybe you've used the PSC tool, maybe you've come to us as a partner, maybe you've done a combination of both. Just start somewhere and see where you want to go from there. 

Also acknowledge that maybe there are limitations — maybe you have private-label branding with regulations that say, "You're going to take this to the landfill; we're scared of upcycling or any other treatment method." Getting them comfortable with the transparency behind how you take that material and put it back into the value chain, and educating those relationships, matters, because your distribution and your whole enterprise might look a little different. Y

ou might have direct manufacturing and co-manufacturing, so acknowledge what those different points are on the waste side, as well as looking upstream. Leverage the resources. There are so many people in sustainability who just want to help and do the right thing. Talking to someone doesn't obligate you to join, to use their product, or to opt into a partnership. There's education available for you to leverage and make good choices, and all of that lends to a better result.

Beaton: A lot of companies in the pet industry also work in the human space, because it's the same equipment and the same ingredients. What are some lessons companies anywhere along the manufacturing or supply chain can take from the human side of their business to apply to their sustainability messaging in the pet space? How applicable are things happening on the human side to the pet side that companies maybe aren't taking advantage of but should?

Stone: Right off the bat — and this isn't a knock on pet food — if you look at sanitation practices and preventative maintenance, keeping that same food safety in mind is a big thing for preventing issues or quality rejects. Mirror some of those same practices in your pet food. It's the same principles. Look at those opportunities and tap into the same resources, because they apply to both segments of your business. Break down the silos and apply those same principles.

Ocker: You hit it head-on. Instead of dissecting each individual thing, so many sustainability initiatives are connected across different parts of the manufacturing line or stream. You end up helping the whole by starting in one spot. So much overlaps that if you start in one place — sanitation, for example — it's natural to move it to another part of the process, and before you know it, you've put five measures in place without even realizing it.

Lamancusa: I'd highlight that the human food side does a really good job with traceability. That should happen more in the pet industry. Pet parents want to know where their food comes from, and they want to know where their pet's food comes from. Only a few brands have really embraced that — where you can scan a QR code and see the farm a protein came from. There's a huge opportunity to connect that and gain a lot more customer loyalty, because customers want to know — whether it's human-grade food, a co-product or a byproduct — the farm it came from and that the animals on that farm were treated well. Animal welfare and traceability.

Beaton: I want to leave our audience with something actionable. From your perspective, what's the number one thing a company in the pet space can do to determine, one, where they fit in the sustainability conversation, and two, how to move forward if they have an idea but not yet a plan?

Ocker: We've definitely hit on it. The best thing is to educate yourself or your company, and know where you're starting. Whether you go down individual pathways or look at the broader umbrella, commit to it — and you're going to run into challenges. I come from an R&D background; how many formulas failed before one succeeded? It happens, but you learn and take something away from everything you try. Maybe this isn't the best for us — let's reassess how it meets our goals. 

Understand where you are and work through the process slowly, because eventually it becomes second nature to everyone, and that makes reaching the goal easier. Start somewhere, commit to it, and know it's okay to make mistakes, because we're still learning from them. Then go investigate something else and how it fits — whether it's a product design, a company design, manufacturing or logistics. It fits into the bigger system as well.

Stone: My top two things: baseline, and start with your people. If you have an idea and you're trying to figure out how to put it in place, starting with your people is a great way to break down silos. Empower the people at your plants, your sites and within your processes, and ask their opinion — you might be surprised at the ideas they have and how you can make them viable. Plus, you get buy-in from folks who feel like they're part of something, and sustainability isn't going to work unless the people at your sites are engaged. That baseline helps educate and gives transparency around where you are. 

The two tie in so well together. Don't be afraid to ask, and don't be afraid to reach out to folks with expertise in those areas. My favorite part of the job is when customers come to me and say, "Hey, I have this crazy idea. What if we did this? Could it work?" It could work. I get excited about that stuff. Don't be afraid to ask, start with your people and baseline what you have. That's a great foundation for starting out on your sustainability journey.

Lamancusa: Those are all great points, and I 100% agree. One thing I'll add to the baselining is that sustainability has to be properly resourced. You can't expect a junior manager to run your entire corporate sustainability strategy, because it will fail — and that often happens, where companies say, "Let's just hire somebody and they'll take care of that." If you want a true sustainability journey, it has to be resourced, with direct budget and responsibility at the C level, to be truly successful. That's number one. 

Number two: customers like to see a journey. You don't have to be perfect. There is no perfect product — every product has an environmental footprint — but customers like to see the journey you're on. Don't feel like you have to be perfect. Be transparent. Here are the goals we set, and if you miss them, tell customers, "We missed it because of X, Y and Z, and here's what we're going to do to fix it for next year." It actually builds more authenticity, because we're all human, and we like seeing that we fail, succeed and rally together to make it better next time. Don't be afraid to be human and be transparent — it'll help your business in the long run.

Beaton: I want to thank you all for coming together for today's special live episode. Sustainability is a topic I keep coming back to on the podcast, in our magazine and as an entity, because it continues to morph and grow. Over the last several years, it's become such a hot, nuanced topic that we have to keep covering it. The conversations just get better and better. Before we go, I always let my guests do a little plug. Where can people find you right now, and when this episode comes out after Forum, where can people find you in general?

Lamancusa: Here at Petfood Forum, we're at booth 1034. After Petfood Forum, you can find us at petsustainability.org.

Ocker: In about an hour and a half, I'm doing a technical talk at the 310 session on alternative and sustainable upcycled ingredients, so you can catch me there today. I post regularly on LinkedIn — follow us on LinkedIn and feel free to reach out. Whether or not we have what you need, we'll find it. We have a system that's what the company was built on. Greenhushing is really what IIC has been doing, so now I'm going to green shout about them.

Stone: As you may have already understood, we're a total waste management company. We can take any and all of the waste you manufacture as byproducts from your processing and find sustainable homes for those materials. We also capture all the data behind those systems and generate customized reports for our customers. We consider ourselves a one-stop shop for all your waste needs. 

We're at booth 734, conveniently located right next to the bathroom, so you can't miss us. Come check out our total waste management program. We're part of The Heritage Group, and we have another company focused on sustainability called Climco for energy audits and things of that nature. You can find Envita Solutions and myself on LinkedIn.

Beaton: That's it for this episode of Trending: Pet Food, live from Petfood Forum 2026. You can find us on petfoodindustry.com, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast platform. If you want to chat or have any feedback, I'd love to hear from you — drop me an email at [email protected]. Once again, I'm Lindsay Beaton, your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks for tuning in!