Partner: WSP

Take a stroll to your local supermarket and you may notice the high quantity of non-recyclable food packaging. In fact, it’s estimated that in one year, the world produces 141 million tons of plastic packaging a year. That’s roughly the equivalent of 141 million 1979 Volkswagen Beetles, which is significantly more than the manufacturer produced.

Further to just packaging, it is estimated that global food production contributes 17.3 billion metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. And food waste causes more greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.

The solution isn’t as simple as buying local apples, or pizza packaged in cardboard, it’s an overhaul of the way society thinks. It must extend into all aspects of life, from transport and clothing to the food our pets eat. That, is where this article comes in.

This is a story about an environmental life cycle assessment calculator that our partner for this episode, consultant WSP, has created for a pet food business called Open Farm. It is a story about how one business has implemented technology to tackle some of the most difficult challenges that any company will face when it comes to understanding and reducing its carbon footprint. This includes addressing the carbon generated by its supply chain, known in industry as scope three emissions. Open Farm’s experience could offer valuable lessons for other companies.

To provide a more thorough understanding of the ethos of Open Farm, co-founder Jacqueline Prehogan referenced the dogs that started it all. Their three rescued pug-mixes, Bella, Maddie and Ducan, are her inspiration. Of all three beloved pets Prehogan affirms that “they’re definitely the inspiration and a big part of what we do. Giving us ideas but also they’re why we love what we do, because it’s pets like them that we’re working for every day.”

It was through the love of her dogs and the personal transition she and her family were undergoing that Prehogan began to consider the animal welfare behind her meals. As a family, they applied an ethos to consider where their food was coming from, alongside how sustainable and ethical the rearing practices were that went into their food. An ideology they strived to extend into the food they provided for their pets.

“The original idea was a humanely raised pet food,” Prehogan explains, “we went out looking for that and when we couldn’t find it, we realised that there was an opportunity, that other people must be looking for the same thing.” With the push to shop local and consider the origins of our food, Open Farm wanted to take the stance a step further. “The concept grew into ethically sourced pet food, which has a bigger scope, with animal welfare being core alongside sustainability. We wanted to really look into how all of our ingredients are sourced and the packaging they come in. A very holistic approach to ethical sourcing for our product.”

Besides this, Prehogan was very aware of the time constraints on prospective customers. Being a mother, pet parent and two-time business owner herself, she strived to provide a quick and easy solution to pet food, without compromising on nutritional value or enjoyment. “So, for me,” she says. “One scoop of kibble, a scoop of freeze dried, one of bone broth: ‘wham, bam’, done in about one minute.”

Further to this, the co-founders considered the psychological aspect of pet parent food decisions. They observed the ease with which owners make choices regarding their own food, compared to the confusion and need for research and guidance when determining the preferred choice for their pets. By clearly providing understandable information, they wanted to ensure pet parents know exactly what Open Farm’s values are and what the benefits are for their pets. “And they might even make a change in their own food based on what they learnt through their pet food, which is really cool,” Prehogan excitedly says.

It was all of these principles that inspired their mission, “to do some good for animals and the planet,” explains Prehogan. They strived to consider every aspect of their products, from formulation to intention alongside deliciousness and nutritional value.

They wanted to earn customer support and knew they needed to provide backing to their claims and certifications. With this in mind Open Farm hired Megan Tuttle as Director of Impact, and she was keenly aware that actions speak louder than words. “That’s really why we set our science-based targets. While we can make small changes to our sources and packaging, most of our emissions come from our supply chain.”

Science-based targets are a critical mechanism for demonstrating that emissions are being reduced in line with the requirements of the 2015 Paris Agreement. This landmark global pact, frequently mentioned on Engineering Matters, aims to prevent the earth from warming beyond repair, keeping global warming on a path of below 1.5°C. To align with this, Open Farm set a target in 2020 to reduce their scope one (from sources that are controlled or owned by the company) and two (purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling for company use) emissions by 42% over the coming decade.

Furthermore, they set a goal with which to measure and reduce their scope three emissions. These being the most difficult to tackle due to including a larger number of categories (from purchased goods and services, to business travel and waste), they’re working to refine how ambitious they can be for here.

She continues by explaining the role WSP has taken, “So the WSP team really helped us out setting that science-based target, but the LCA calculator focused on our scope three and our supply chain emissions. So what that did was look at each of our different products and all of the components of our products, not just the ingredients, but the packaging, and the transportation and delivery at each different node of the supply chain. To lay out at a product level what the greenhouse gas footprint was.”

The results that arose from the examination of the early stages were not surprising, essentially that ingredients are a hotspot, a daily obvious conclusion when they are over 75%-85% meat based. This is not, however, a blanket statement, the level of impact differs with the type of protein used. Consider the difference between beef and poultry, cattle produce significantly more greenhouse gases than a chicken would for example.

The solution is not to completely remove beef or all meat from the foods, as they are a primary source of protein for pets and important for the agricultural industry. Tuttle can verify that “we have native grasslands in the Western US, and cows actually do a really good job of keeping that grass and preserving that landscape. Ensuring that land is still economically viable in agriculture, and preventing it from being converted to a mono crop such as corn or wheat or soy.”

To balance this with greenhouse gas emissions, they can employ various carbon offsetting measure such as carbon sinks and regenerative agriculture. This method of farming focuses on aspects such as soil health and water management. Overall, Open Farm work with their farmers to better understand the supply chain practices they use.

The positive impact doesn’t end there, purchasing from these farms supports their sense of community. Prehogan tells of visiting these farms as an almost idyllic experience, in which generational, family farms consist of parents, children, pets and livestock living together.

There is, however, a problem in that Open Farm cannot purchase products directly from the hundreds of these farms that they partner with. Instead, the produce is sent to a processing facility and consolidated for them to buy from. The benefits of this are highlighted by Prehogan, “And what I love about the Certified Humane programme is that there’s an audit process at every level. At the farm, for the animal welfare standards, there’s an audit at the processing (slaughter) level, which is to comply with the slaughter standards, and then there’s even one at the manufacturing facility to ensure that there’s proper cleaning of equipment and so on, so that only our meat goes into our bags. It’s really extensive, but that’s how we’re able to work with all of theses individual little farms, and it’s great because they then get compensated for having better practices.”

On a related note, Open Farm also considers the environmental aspects of the packaging they use, ensuring that it is designed to avoid landfill. The majority goes through the TerraCycle programme, taking hard to recycle materials, such as multilayer pet food bags, and recycling them into helpful items such as park benches. 

In order to ensure that their customers know how to properly dispose of this packaging so it can be recycled, they are working with the organisation How to Recycle to create a standardised labelling system explaining the process to the customer. Tuttle says that “what they do is really clearly explain to the customer what to do with each of the different components of their packaging. So we’re launching two kibble bags that’ll be curbside recyclable in Canada, store drop off in the US and then our supplements packaging will be widely recyclable in both countries.” 

Life cycle analysis

The analysis of every aspect of Open Farm’s product’s life cycle is where WSP’s Samantha Metaxas and the calculator come in. Metaxas works with companies to help them understand their environmental impact by quantifying their greenhouse gas inventory and discussing how best to reduce their impacts through targets and other initiatives. 

Of the process, Metaxas says “We carried out a series of workshops with the Open Farm team to understand what vision objectives, and ultimately KPI’s and targets they wanted to set with respect to climate change. And then we also covered a few actions that they could take at a high level to start reducing that impact after we had quantified their inventory. […] But we also went through a number of conversations and through those workshops to get a broader understanding of why they were taking on this work, how it aligned with their brand and their goals as an organisation, and where they ultimately wanted to be. So that’s where those workshops came in. And I think it’s helped provide a broader context for the more technical work that we were doing.”

This technical work was a greenhouse gas inventory, calculating the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Open Farm across a calendar year. It provided a top-down perspective on their operations and impacts. This led into the development and use of the life cycle assessment calculator to analyse the data from a product-based approach, or the bottom-up perspective. They could now see where their biggest impacts were for each product and use this information in decision making for impact reduction in their recipe and product designs.

To correlate the data from these steps required the life cycle assessment tool. Metaxas says, “Theoretically, the tool could be used to assess any type of product, it could also be used to assess the impact of processes as well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be from the perspective of a final product, although that I think, is what it’s most beneficial for. But it really is flexible in terms of how it’s designed.”

But the creation of this tool was no easy task, it required multiple drafts and iterations to be created alongside depending partially on Open Farm for the data to input, and partially on industry standard data.

The result can be loosely described as a carbon pie chart, showing the amount of carbon produced in each area (or slice). Seeing this breakdown allowed Open Farm to understand which slices needed work and delve deeper into those to discover why. However, this does mean that the calculator relies heavily on the data it is fed. 

Returning to the earlier beef vs chicken environmental impact disparity, Metaxas explains that “for that reason, we want to dive deeper into those ingredients in terms of the data that we use” as currently it is primarily sourced from industry benchmarks, for example the standard greenhouse gas emissions for 1kg of beef.

An improvement Metaxas would like to make would be to work directly with Open Farm’s suppliers “to better understand what practices they’re employing on the farm for example and be able to refine that emission factor and have it be more bespoke to Open Farm’s operations. So that’s one area of improvement that we’re currently pursuing.”

Fundamentally, the life cycle assessment tool was designed to assist in their understanding of the impacts from individual products so Open Farm could prioritise high impact areas and make informed decisions with their research and development.

A development of understanding their overall environmental impact has been the design of new products: plant and insect-based kibbles. With which there will still be full transparency of the carbon footprints of the products.

The insect kibble is particularly exciting for Prehogan, alongside having a low carbon footprint, it also classes as a novel protein. “I like this idea of socialising a new concept, just like we did with our animal welfare certifications.” Prehogan continues by explaining, “a lot of dogs have allergies and sensitivities to different proteins, for example a chicken allergy is quite common. When this happens the vet will often want the dog to have a unique or novel protein, something that they’ve never had before. And I’m really excited about the idea of insect as that protein because, typically, pets haven’t had that.”

Working with WSP and their life cycle assessment calculator to better understand their carbon footprint, Open Farm now has a roadmap to head into the future. They aim to forge a path for their industry, pushing forwards in the delivery of their mission and inspiring others to do the same.

An example to follow

Metaxas concludes with the advice, “I think a lot of companies understand that this is a very pressing topic, climate change is a pressing issue. They want to start making moves to do something about it. But my word of advice would be, start by understanding your impact, […] don’t run before you can walk so to speak, there’s always the enthusiasm to jump straight towards target setting, saying I want to be net zero by 2050 and, unfortunately, those kinds of claims don’t hold a lot of weight unless you’ve done the work to understand where you are right now, what is feasible by when and how you’re going to get there.”

Extending this, Tuttle says “I would really love to be the example that other companies follow. Because it is a really long journey, it’s a really tough journey to start to decarbonize your entire value chain. So that is, that is my biggest hope. And I’d love to, beyond that, work and inspire our pet parents and inspire others to kind of go about that journey within their own lives as well and have a really strong foundational understanding of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And how they can take some of those same solutions and implement them in their own lives as well. […] So working to kind of continue to inspire those personal decisions, because I think that’s how we’ll ultimately be successful as a society in addressing a lot of the issues around climate change.”