2026-09-03
— Sustainability and humanization continue to serve as top trends for the pet food industry, brought on by consumer concerns about the environment and the growing treatment of dogs and cats as children. According to NielsenIQ, two growing trends in the pet food industry include upcycling and human-grade products, prompting discussions on the use of byproducts in pet nutrition. The Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC) dived into this topic in its webinar hosted last week, entitled “Optimizing Coproducts and Byproducts for a Sustainable Pet Industry.”
Allison Reser, director of Sustainability and Innovation at PSC, kicked off the webinar by examining the difference between pet food ingredient types. In the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) Official Publication, byproducts are defined as “secondary products produced in addition to the principal product.”
Human grade is defined by the AAFCO Official Publication as “every ingredient and the resulting product must be stored, handled, processed and transported in a manner that is consistent and compliant with 21 CFR part 117 and all other applicable federal human food law.” As Reser highlighted, human-grade ingredients are much more focused on where the ingredient is handled and processed rather than its quality.
Upcycled is a term that has been gaining popularity in pet food, with the Upcycled Food Association defining its Upcycled Food Certification as “use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment.” Reser noted the goal of upcycling focused on preventing materials and ingredients from going to landfills, a mission that is dear to the rendering industry.
The role of rendering
In the United States, there’s a significant portion of animals us humans choose not to consume. In fact, Charles Starkey, Ph.D., vice president of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs for the North American Renderers Association (NARA), shared that nearly 50% of an animal is considered inedible by humans. To save these undesirable parts from landfills, renderers take them and dehydrate them, transforming them into various ingredients for use in pet food formulas, as well as other products for the livestock and fuel industries.
For example, renderers will create chicken byproduct meal, blood meal, chicken fat, palatants and more from leftover chicken viscera, heads, feet, blood, hearts and livers that humans won’t eat and would otherwise be wasted.
“Those products [viscera and offal] go into rendering or other processes to make protein meals, or fats, flavors and other additives that are very nutritious for animals,” Starkey explained.
As consumers and those in the pet food industry become more interested in zero waste and full utilization concepts, the rendering industry continues to evolve its technology and processes.
“We have some lower-temperature methodologies that don’t damage nutrients, such as vitamins,” Starkey shared. “Our whole goal is to reuse everything and get it back into use as part of the circular economy and keep utilizing that product.”
Additionally, Starkey noted that the rendering industry has significantly enhanced its logistics in transporting raw material to rendering facilities, resulting in minimal degradation of the material. In fact, many rendering facilities are attached to human food processing facilities.
Not only are rendered products highly nutritious for pets, but they also contribute benefits to the environment. According to Starkey, the rendering industry transforms about 30 million tons of product per year into valuable products.
“Since rendering is dehydration, we produce, treat and put back about four billion gallons of clean water back in the environment,” he added. “Our entire goal in the rendering industry is to provide safe, healthy and nutritious food for our animals and pets… There are lots of products that are high in vitamins, minerals and nutrients and they need to go somewhere besides the landfill, so we find other uses for them.”
Allocating impact
When it comes to understanding the environmental impact of these rendered byproducts, Janjoris van Diepen, footprint director North America for Mérieux NutriSciences | Blonk, advises companies to examine the entire supply chain, from inputs and crop production to the animal farm and final product. This allows for a full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and allocation. There are many different ways to determine allocation depending on what LCA standards are being used.
“Allocation is about how you split the emissions of all those activities to the different products that come out of your production system,” he explained. “…For rendering this is very relevant because we need to allocate at the slaughterhouse to the different products that come out of the slaughterhouse. We have to allocate emissions to the meat that goes into human food and we have to allocate emissions to the coproducts that can go into pet food or animal feed.”
To ensure standardization, the Global Feed LCA Institute (GFLI) offers a database of more than 1,800 LCA datasets for feed ingredients, including rendered products, used in Europe. The data dives into the climate impact of a range of rendered ingredients, from pig and poultry fat to blood and feather meal and more, and where the emissions came from (i.e. rendering facility or slaughterhouse).
“For some rendered products, most of the emissions really take place at the animal production states and for other rendered products most of the emissions are in the rendering facility because of the heat that you are using to render,” van Diepen detailed. “These kinds of studies really give you the insights into those hotspots… In the end, you want to compare different ingredients. As a pet food producer, you want to compare different ingredients and also compare different environmental impacts. So, it’s really important that you use the same allocation rules.”
Using data from the GFLI, producers can compare the impact of rendered ingredients with others, like plant-based, allowing them to make more informed ingredient choices.
“When a company starts on their footprint journey, you start with collecting your emission factors. You get numbers on your ingredients and you try to get insights into the different emission factors of your products,” van Diepen shared. “That’s a really good starting point because it gives you an idea of the impact of packaging and the idea of the impact of certain ingredients. But if you really want to work on a reduction strategy and make choices on different ingredients or sourcing, then you really have to dive into the supply chains and get standardized data to make these kinds of comparisons and make informed decisions.
“We have seen that with byproducts you could potentially lower the footprint of your pet food product,” he added. “So, if you’re not yet doing an environmental footprint assessment, start with collecting the emissions of your ingredients. When you really want to work on a reduction strategy, make sure you make the right comparisons.”
Consumer perception
Though rendered ingredients and byproducts offer nutritional and environmental benefits, pet food manufacturers and the rendering industry continue to battle negative consumer perceptions around these ingredients, partly due to humanization.
Humanization has evolved into a double-edged sword. On one hand, the treatment of pets as humans has helped spark more research on pet health and nutrition and allowed more innovation to enter the market. But it has also led to the demonization of byproducts, with consumers misunderstanding the safety and quality of these ingredients in favor of human grade. The reality: human-grade ingredients are not inherently safer or better than feed-grade ingredients.
“The idea here [with human grade] is that it communicates a wholesomeness that these pet parents are used to in their own food choices. They recognize that it is something akin to a USDA inspection; it’s a regulatory term and they presume that there’s safety aspects associated with it,” explained Greg Aldrich, Ph.D., chief operating officer of Nulo. “But what most of them don’t understand is there’s safety aspects with the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that applies to pet foods as well, and so today pet food is as safe or safer than human foods.
“So there really isn’t a need for that moniker, but really what it tries to do is describe to the consumer that this is a product that they don’t have to have mystery around and they can make a solid informed choice,” he added. “It’s up to us to give them the rest of the information of whether or not a pet-grade product is equal to or better, in some cases, than a human-grade product.”
Regarding the safety of byproducts, the FSMA has enforced a range of rules and food safety measures regarding the entire supply chain, from raw materials going into formulations to finished product, to ensure pet food is safe for animal consumption. And when it comes to the quality of byproducts, they can be equal to or better in nutritional value than non-byproducts, as Aldrich demonstrated.
“The only difference between chicken meal and chicken byproduct meal was that the chicken byproduct meal, as it’s defined in the AAFCO Official Publication, potentially contains head, feet and organs or viscera/offals,” he explained. “When we measure the protein quality of those two ingredients side by side in a protein efficiency ratio, we’ll see that the chicken byproduct meal, while it’s considered a byproduct and inferior by a lot of folks, is actually a higher-quality ingredient because we’ve included those offals, livers, hearts, spleens and lungs. They have a very high biological value both in their digestibility and in their composition of amino acids… It really comes down to whether or not we can communicate that to our consumers and get them to understand those things.”
To overcome the negative consumer perception around byproducts, Aldrich noted that it’s important that brands realize they can’t be everything to all consumers, they must pick their consumers and focus on addressing their consumers’ needs through communication and education.
“The industry is doing an exceptional job today of optimizing coproducts and byproducts,” he said. “What we’ve got to do is an even better job of communicating with our consumers, our customers, our pet parents as to what that value means to both their food supply chain and their pets’ nutrition, health and wellbeing.”
Reser concluded, “Byproducts are not gross. They’re safe, they’re regulated, and they should be in pet food. Also, there is not this black and white spectrum of human-grade, premium ingredients over here and byproducts over there. There are a lot of different trade-offs and a lot of different great options, and it needs to just be communicated to the customer.”