Carnivore Meat Company Announces New Sustainability Initiatives

Furthering its sustainability initiatives, Carnivore Meat Company announced it will undertake sweeping changes to reduce shipping materials along with increasing overall production capacity and dramatically cutting its electricity consumption.

“Since we kicked off efforts in 2019 to reduce our overall impact on the environment, we have continued to make incremental changes toward improvement,” said CEO and owner Lanny Viegut. “We are proud that we have been able to preserve the cost of goods to our clients without a single price increase in nearly three years because of these measures. That’s unheard of in any industry!”

A vital, and often overlooked, aspect is the company’s ability to offset increases in manufacturing costs, wages and benefits, raw material and packaging costs with the savings resulting from sustainability improvements.

This next phase will result in updates to the Vital Essentials and Vital Cat frozen and freeze-dried product lines and is expected to be complete by early next year. Changes include:

• Increased production of its freeze-dried and frozen food for cats and dogs resulting from a simple change in the shape of the mini patty products from round to square.
• Case configuration changes that will allow product to be packed, inventoried and shipped more efficiently, reducing overall shipping materials consumed by the company and its customers.

“By making slight machine adjustments and forging new plates, the frozen and freeze-dried mini patties will transition from round to square, increasing output by 30 percent per batch,” commented Brian Lakari, VP of Operations. “More significantly, however, will be the reduction in electrical consumption by 200,800 KW per year.”

As a direct result, the energy savings is enough to power 19 Wisconsin households for one year.

In coordination with the first phase of Carnivore Meat Company’s sustainability initiatives, which were completed in 2019, case configurations for Vital Essentials and Vital Cat freeze-dried food and treats are being updated.

“By using a slightly larger shipping case, we can increase the pack density per unit which will allows us to reduce our overall cardboard consumption by 30 percent while increasing warehouse capacity,” stated Lakari. This benefits the entire supply chain from national and international distributors to retailers to freight carriers as they will ship more freight and less air.

Maximizing the amount of product in each shipping case will also reduce the transport of goods between production and distribution facilities located in Green Bay, WI. “We anticipate 343 fewer miles per year in the movement of finished goods between facilities,” commented Lakari. “This represents a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 16.9 metric tons annually.”

“We serve more than 6,000 pet retailers throughout North America, ship Vital Essentials and Vital Cat to 14 countries and sell online with e-commerce partners like Amazon and Chewy. This phase will propel us forward in meeting the expectations of our customers to become a more socially conscious steward of our community’s resources locally and globally,” remarked Viegut.