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Bigger isn’t always better…..
While the global shortages and transportation delays have been challenging it presented an opportunity to view our products with more scrutiny and in so doing we realized that bigger isn’t necessarily better.
As we were presented with limited supply we needed to focus that supply in less size variations while the 10lb bag at first glance seems the better minimalist and green option closer look reveals that is not so. The larger bags are more likely to get damaged during shipping accounting for a majority of damage claims, for this reason our next purchase of 10lb packaging we would need a much thicker and slightly larger bag which would require more plastic. That is only a small part of the problem with the larger food options. To make a 10lb Bag of Real Meat requires 30lbs of fresh meat! When a bag is damaged that meat is added to the landfills, the same is true for returned bags do to satisfaction claims. Discarded food is a huge impact on our society, besides the food itself you have the transportation and packaging of the original product and the resources required to replace, not to mention the added cost built into the purchase price of our foods to cover these losses.
Each year 1.3 Billion tons of food is discarded and has a huge impact on the environment. With this data we have decided to eliminate 10lb bags with 5lb being the largest option, essentially cutting food waste in half, however 5lb bags travel better and have a lower damage rate than the 10lb so we estimate our food waste to be cut by 70%!!!
Since our foods and treats requires an oxygen and moisture barrier do to the fact they are natural and contain no chemical preservatives we are still left with limited packaging options, we hope soon they will develop the technology for the fully recyclable, durable, minimal impact packaging, but until then we can do the following to do our part to limit waste.
Each year millions of tons of “old” packaging are simply tossed in the trash!!! This is perfectly good packaging but for reasons like ingredient changes, size changes, etc. the packaging is not useful for retail sales. Our commitment is to find ways to use the outdated packaging. Our left over 10lb bags will be used for storage of bulk materials, we are sending them to our suppliers to use to package our ingredients rather than source new bags, we will use them for our storage needs and for anytime we would need to purchase a similar bag. We will over label packaging when needed rather than discard, an added cost and hassle but eliminates tossing outdated packaging in the trash. A previous error on one of our bags presented us with 70,000 bags that do not display well, these will be used in a combo pack promo box. We always run out old packaging before switching to the new, as much as we would sometimes like to hurry up and get it over with we make the effort to ensure all packaging gets used and not discarded.
While we continue to search for the perfect fully recyclable packaging that provides the barrier required for our products we can continue to find alternate ways to lessen our impact!