Q&A Interview with Carnivore Meat Company’s Heather Govea and Lindsay Meyers
Carnivore Meat Company, manufacturer of Vital Essentials and one of North America’s largest freeze-dried pet food producers, has rolled out the Vital Essentials Promise, a transparency initiative focused on sharing how its products are made, the standards behind them, and the steps it takes to support both safety and nutrition.
The launch of the Vital Essentials Promise reflects Carnivore Meat Company’s broader commitment to transparency around the science and standards behind its product. As part of the initiative, the company is providing information about the use of electron beam technology (eBeam), a type of FDA-approved irradiation Carnivore Meat Company leverages to help reduce harmful pathogens while preserving the nutritional integrity of raw pet food and treats.
“Pet parents are asking more questions about where their pet’s food comes from, how it’s made, and what companies are doing to keep it safe,” said Heather Govea, CEO of Carnivore Meat Company. “We believe food safety should not be proprietary, and the Vital Essentials Promise is our commitment to sharing more about the science, investments, and processes behind our products so pet parents can feel confident about what they’re feeding.”
Electron beam (eBeam) technology is a form of food irradiation regulated by the FDA for more than 40 years—and used in more than 60 countries worldwide—that uses high-energy electrons to reduce pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli. The technology is used throughout the human food industry on products ranging from spices and produce to meat and seafood. Because it is applied as the last step in the manufacturing process to sealed products and without heat, eBeam helps reduce harmful pathogens without significantly altering nutritional content.
“We don’t believe pet parents should have to choose between raw nutrition and food safety,” added Lindsay Meyers, Vice President of Technical Services at Carnivore Meat Company. “Our responsibility is to keep looking for ways to improve, follow the science, and make decisions that support both.”
Carnivore Meat Company partnered with Texas A&M University to validate the effectiveness of its food safety program using products from its own portfolio. The independent research found significant reductions in Salmonella and Listeria while maintaining the nutritional profile required for a complete and balanced raw diet. The research found that eBeam achieved pathogen reduction efficacy up to 100 times greater than industry-standard HPP doses under the conditions evaluated. The peer-reviewed study also makes Carnivore Meat Company the first raw pet food company to have a kill step independently validated in a peer-reviewed journal at this level of efficacy. This study is now available in the Frontiers Journal of Veterinary Medicine.
The announcement comes as interest in minimally processed pet nutrition continues to grow, with consumers increasingly seeking greater transparency around ingredient sourcing, manufacturing practices, and food safety standards.
As part of the Vital Essentials Promise, the company is highlighting four core pillars that guide its approach to product development and manufacturing: ingredient traceability, manufacturing processes, food safety standards, and decades of experience in the pet industry. For Carnivore Meat Company, the goal is simple: help retailers and pet parents better understand what’s behind the products they’re feeding every day.
Recently, Heather Govea and Lindsay Meyers talked to Pet Insight about collaborating with Texas A&M University, the impactful steps the company has taken to keep pet food safe and accessible and setting a new standard of safety in pet food.
How is Vital Essentials pushing the category forward with regards to food safety? What does this mean for enhancing consumer confidence in raw overall. Why is that important for retailers to take note of?
Heather Govea: As I joined the business, I sat down with a lot of different customers and looked at a lot of different brands out in the market. Coming from the days of melamine, knowing that every other area of the industry there is a documented and accepted kill step yet there wasn’t in pet food that had been really enforced in terms of industry norm. The way that we have approached it is that we really believe food safety should not be proprietary. There is nothing in pet food that anyone should ever worry about putting their food next to their 2-year-old kid that is running around on the floor. And they shouldn’t have to worry about their pet’s health. That’s a lot of why we really kind of decided to pioneer and push forward on the food safety front.
Lindsay Meyers: Food safety should not be proprietary. There are a lot of things we can protect, but food safety shouldn’t be one of them. At Carnivore Meat Company, maker of Vital Essentials products, we wanted raw meat that has all the unique properties of raw meat, but that meant finding something that could reduce common bacterial pathogens like Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. We’ve all seen the recalls out there. We needed something that could control those pathogens without making the food not raw.
When we think of how we destroy those pathogens, there’s a reason the packaging on raw chicken from the grocery store says to cook it to a certain temperature. We know heat can eradicate those pathogens. But we don’t want to apply heat. So what do we do? We found this eBeam technology, which has been used in the human food space for decades but hasn’t been researched in pet food. We validated this approach in partnership with Texas A&M University. This technology uses electron beams without any application of heat, simply using electricity for a short amount of time to interrupt the pathways of the living organisms inside the meat.
So, for any bacterial pathogens that are still there, we can make sure those are eradicated without interrupting the structure that makes raw meat look like raw meat. We partnered with Texas A&M to apply this technology to our foods in their finished format. This step can be applied at the very end. We can do everything to make that food convenient for pet parents, get it into the package and then apply this technology. There are no chemicals left in the food, and no changes to its color, smell, taste or nutrient content.
We put our findings together in a peer-reviewed paper with a university research team to get the information out there and show what we can do. We want everyone to know that raw foods can stay balanced and safe for pets and have the food safety that consumers can trust.
Heather Govea: There’s nothing more natural than electrons. You look at HPP, you look at other types of kill steps, and there’s nothing wrong with those kill steps. It’s always a brand decision. But for us, there’s literally nothing more natural than that.
The thing that is particularly special about this is it’s in a finished bag. Unlike other kill steps, if you had 10 steps in a process, it’s maybe step 2 or step 3 and then you have risk of recontamination all throughout the process. There’s always risk of recontamination anytime you’re doing a kill step that early. When it’s in the finished bag, nothing else is going in it. Not only that, the actual efficacy is significantly higher in terms of how much it kills. We go from a 3 to 3.5 log kill on an HPP to a 5 to 7 log kill on our products.
Lindsay Meyers: It’s important to recognize that anything, whether we’re talking about heat, HPP, or eBeam, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about. You can sterilize something with all three of those technologies. The unique thing about eBeam for Vital Essentials products is that we were able to figure out a dose map of how much we can apply that will give us a log reduction 100 times more effective than the one we experience with HPP.
This is just a couple of seconds. Already in that finished bag, I have no risk of recontamination. And then we can focus on the other things that we’re great at. We’re really proud to share that with the broader community.
Describe the paper that’s being released around your kill step process in detail—and more importantly, what it means for retailers and consumers.
Heather Govea: Given how much has happened, and what can be perceived as consumer distrust of pet food in general, there isn’t another university-backed, peer-reviewed study on raw pet food and making it safe for consumers to feed. From our perspective, being able to lead as the first to do that, we think that’s incredibly important, and we think that if anything, it allows people to take the scare factor out of the splashy headlines. We think that also puts us in a position to say to the raw pet food industry that we all need to make sure we are guarding an industry that is special and offers superior nutrition. Here’s one of the ways we’re doing that. We’re not suggesting it’s the way for all. But food safety is not proprietary, and we all need to make sure we are stepping up and leading in that regard. If anything, a consumer or retailer now can say this is a brand that’s invested a lot of money; there’s no payback for us to do a university-backed study. A lot of it was just us saying we want to make sure we know that we know that our kill step does what we believe it does. We wanted someone else to ensure we were definitely down the right path.
Lindsay Meyers: The rigor of peer review is unique. The veterinary community has been asking for this specifically in the raw and minimally processed foods space for some time. And the fact that it hasn’t been done is surprising. I’m hoping this leads the way for others to do the same thing.
We’ve seen a great deal of tumult in the freeze-dried and raw categories in the last few years. How has Vital Essentials managed to thrive in the face of those challenges?
Heather Govea: I think it all comes back to going down to core basics. We talk about our values in the company, and first and foremost is leadership in the category; it’s integrity. Doing what we say we’re going to do and not messing around and trying to be more than what we are. Understanding that we can’t be all things to all people. We’re not going to do gently cooked, for example. We believe raw pet food is the right and the best nutrition for all, but we also know that not everyone can afford it. So, to me, when you look at cost, convenience and safety when you look at those three components:
Cost: We’re trying to figure out how we get more people to consider investing significantly more into the bowl, knowing that the benefit is on the other side with their pets’ vitality and longer life. We took the cost factor and said this is obviously a big factor right now, given where the economy is right now. 20 percent of the bowl or more—we can get there.
Convenience: We talked about the way we’re trying to position the product to be easier to feed and take away the ick factor and make it more accessible to everyone.
Safety: Which, to us, is the last of those three pillars.
We don’t focus on the competitor’s stuff. We watch, and we are mindful of that, but our focus is on growing share, not just of our brand, but growing category share, and how do we make it more accessible, and how do we get raw pet food into more people’s hands. That’s been our mission since day one; it’s been our mission since the company was founded. It’s still the same mission from when Lanny Viegut founded the company. That continues to be where we invest—whether it’s people, manufacturing, innovation, retailer partnerships and how we reach the consumers.
How does your announcement here change the landscape for feeding raw?
Heather Govea: We are hoping that we’ll change the category and not because we think eBeam is for everyone. We want to make sure that food safety no longer becomes a question mark. That it’s no longer proprietary. That we’re competing based on what every other pet food company competes on which is brand proposition, nutrition, feeding, surprising and delighting our consumers, our relationship with our retailers—that’s where we want to compete. We don’t want to compete on a food safety message and who’s safest. That should never be a question a consumer ever has when feeding their pet. You should never question whether this food is safe.
Can you describe the current Vital Essentials operation? Things have changed so markedly in the last 5 years that we’d like to give readers an idea of the scale and scope of things.
Heather Govea: I joined the company two and a half years ago. Carnivore was, and our flagship brand Vital Essentials was well on its way to being a leader in the freeze-dried meat and frozen raw pet food space. I say “meat” because meat was the background of the company; you find it every day in what we do. We’re up to 99 percent meat, organs and bones. The reason our background is important is that it’s how Carnivore came to be: meat is an important segment of the raw pet food industry, and founding a brand that’s based on the essentials that meat can deliver is important.
Lanny Viegut founded the company, and I’ve been here for two and a half years. Our focus is and will remain: continue to expand on raw and freeze-dried pet nutrition. The management changes we made were an evolution of what Lenny had already created and had done an incredible job with.It was the maturation of the business for us to go from a meat company into a pet food company. I was the first real pet food person that joined, and by that I mean someone who had any kind of tenure experience, understood the pet food industry and since then we’ve continued to bring on pet industry professionals that understand and continue to support our mission, which is our brand in every bowl. Being able to take down the mystique of what raw pet food feeding is; it’s very cliquey and difficult to understand and challenging for our consumers to decipher what that does. It’s a story that really is bigger than what consumers see on the shelf. So the important pivot we made two and a half years ago is that it’s both the growing and scaling of a company, but it’s also about how we take the great foundation we have, [and] invest in people, manufacturing, innovation, food safety and our infrastructure to make sure we can service and bring raw pet food nutrition to a broader audience. Part of that means growing in the channels that we’re in. Independent pet remains a really important part of our story, as do the rest of our channels. Education and being able to speak to that with the breadth and depth that we can now, with what we’ve done to mature the business, has been really important.
We aren’t looking to move air around in a bubble for the everyday consumer. Our focus is on how we reach more pet parents for the goal and the mission of helping them feed their pets better. When I joined the industry 30 years ago, the idea of feeding pet nutrition that had meat as a first ingredient was novel and revolutionary. The pet food industry has evolved so much that a lot of that had to do with the everyday ground-level work that happens in-store and through education. But I think it’s important for us to be focused on how we continue to do the same thing we did 30 years ago, but continue to level up and make sure that our message is broader in terms of the consumers we engage.
Can we talk about the development of the management team? Key leadership roles that have been filled.
Heather Govea: We have had a focus on a few different areas. One: how do we talk to the consumer? That’s been a lot of our investment in brand and our consumer affairs team. = How do we scale and optimize our manufacturing side? But what I think is the most important and notable is probably our R&D and technical services area. We’ve been really focused on not just approaching it as many brands do which is kind of this how we’ve always done it. But instead, from a science and technical perspective level to which we are testing our nutrients, ensuring the compliance of our product has never been better. We’ve been focusing on food safety, quality and nutrition. We’ve had an R&D leader here with us for about two years who has pet food support. Really, the development of the management team has been about how we complement the really honed-in, background team that we have and couple that with how to talk to pet parents, how to manage pet nutrition, and then above all, safety and quality being No. 1.
How have freeze-dried and raw evolved in the 15 years since Carnivore Meat was founded?
Heather Govea: Yes, it’s evolved but I would also say that the important part we’re trying to lead is making it more familiar, more approachable. We know the pet parent. We look at gently cooked and gently cooked is not a trend on its own; rather, it’s the idea that pet parents are looking for better, healthier products for their pets that are going to extend vitality. tWhat we had 30 years ago is drastically different. Not only in the format of delivery, but what we’re trying to lead is: how do we partner with our independent retailers to make sure that raw is easier to incorporate into everyday feeding routines. It’s a little bit difficult to understand all the details of what’s important when you’re comparing brand to brand. We want to figure out how we take the great products we have and make it so my mom, or the standard pet food consumer, understands 1) how it gets fed, 2) it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach; we’re very approachable about 20 percent in the bowl is where all the health benefits start. The longer that you do that, the better off your pet is going to be. We know the pet will make the decision after that.
That alternative feeding customer is probably also doing a lot of other different types of formats. They have dehydrated, they have goat’s milk, they have supplements, they have a lot of these different things going on that they’re trying to incorporate into their feeding, and for us, it’s about taking away any of the barriers—both language and how we talk to them, as well as the packaging format. It’s why we have the individual peel-and-serve. It allows for people to pick and choose flavors. We’ve taken our Raw Bar, which is something we’ve been known for, and made it so that there’s no ick factor of having to touch all of the very carefully rolled and freeze-dried salmon skin. You don’t have to touch it. This makes it much more approachable.
If people are willing to feed gently cooked, I think a lot of its success comes from making alternative feeding more accessible, simpler and more relatable to what consumers are already doing in their own kitchens.
What are the main consumer concerns or challenges you’re working to overcome with feeding raw and freeze-dried?
Heather Govea: I’m not worried about end categories, switching from this brand to that brand, gaining share and that, to me, is simple and straightforward. We usually win that in food safety and quality really easily. To us, it’s about how do we reach the everyday consumer. How do we reach the soccer mom that wants to feed better, needs it to be easy and needs it to fit into their routine? That’s the real barrier. I think a lot of that definitely is education. I’d say beyond that, there’s a lot of publicity around some FDA concerns on raw pet food safety. It’s why we embarked on ensuring that we looked at the Vital Essentials promise. What are the question marks? First, it’s what I call the ick factor: how do I serve, what does it do, how do we make it everyday language? And then it was I read online all of these alerts about raw pet food, and it’s always this huge thing because they put so much light on it. So how do we come forward, address those, and make consumers feel really confident? But don’t do it like everyone else does.
Lindsay Meyers: Any pet parent—let’s pick the soccer mom— busy, young mom, they want to do the right thing by their pet just like their kids. They want something fresh. Their dogs and cats are not humans; they are carnivores. They need meat, so how do I do that? The three hurdles are always: cost, convenience and safety. I’ve been saying that for years before I entered the pet industry, when I was in the veterinary business. Cost, convenience and safety are the only barriers. Anyone who loves their pet walks into a store and realizes this is the best thing to feed. But the barriers to feeding a 100 percent fresh, raw meat-based diet are cost, convenience and safety. I feel like here at Vital Essentials we have the cost part covered by making sure people know that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing; what can you afford? Is it a treat? Is it 10 percent of the bowl? 20 percent of the bowl? Where are you at today? It’s based on how many pets you have. What your budget is. We can make something affordable for you.
And then convenience, making sure it’s an easy peel-and-serve [packaging format] for those who want to feed frozen, making sure there’s a format that makes sense for you.
And then having the safety handled is something we do well.
The food safety and quality culture here is strong, and it’s been that way for a long time. Those folks who have worked here for years have come from a strong culture of food safety and food quality, like working in human food preparation. These aren’t people who have grown up in pet food country. We are here in the middle of the country in a place that makes a lot of cheese and meat, and these folks really know what they’re doing when it comes to handling food safety and food quality. It’s what really enticed me to come here [to Vital Essentials].
This next thing we’re embracing and embarking on, and really putting our money where our mouth is and investing in, is research. It is really exciting to be able to talk about. We’ve been working on it for a really long time, and to finally be able to speak to it and to show more pet parents, veterinarians, regulators, and more folks what we did to prove that what we’re doing is truly making the food safe is really exciting. It’s that last piece. We’ve known we do it safely for a long time, but being able to put the research in so that we can share that more broadly to industry and to consumers is really exciting.
