Sourcing & Sustainability
Two claims get made constantly in pet food — "sustainably sourced" and "responsibly caught" — and neither means anything on its own. Nobody audits them. Here is what stands behind ours, and where the limits are.
MSC certification, and what it actually requires
Our Salmon Skins and several of our cod items carry the blue Marine Stewardship Council label. That mark is not a logo a brand can license for a fee. It requires two separate things:
- A certified fishery. An independent, accredited body assesses the fishery against the MSC standard — whether the stock is healthy enough to fish, the impact on the wider ecosystem, and whether the fishery is managed well enough to stay that way. The assessment is public.
- Chain of custody. Certification of the fishery alone is not enough. Every business that handles the fish between the boat and the bag has to be separately certified, so that certified and uncertified fish cannot be mixed along the way. This is the part most brands skip, and it is the reason the label can be trusted at all.
You can look up any certified fishery at msc.org — we would rather you check than take our word for it.
We use the part that gets thrown away
The larger point is about what our treats are made from. A cod or a salmon is caught for its fillet. The skin comes off in processing and, in most supply chains, is worth almost nothing — it goes to rendering, to fishmeal, or to landfill.
Our skins, sticks, cubes and twists are made from that skin. This matters more than it sounds: it means no additional fish is caught to produce a bag of treats. The environmental cost of the catch was already paid by the fillet. We are using the rest of the animal rather than asking the ocean for more of it.
It is also why our range is shaped the way it is. We do not make a treat out of prime cod loin, because that would mean fishing for treats.
Drying, not cooking down
The treats are dried rather than extruded or cooked into a paste and re-formed. Drying is what makes them shelf stable, which is the reason there is no preservative on the ingredient line. It also removes most of the raw weight in water, which is why a 5 oz bag represents a good deal more than 5 oz of fish.
What we are not claiming
We are not carbon neutral and we are not going to say we are. Our bags are not yet home compostable; a resealable barrier film is what keeps a dried treat dry, and the compostable alternatives we have tested do not hold up over a product's shelf life. When that changes, we will change, and we will say so here rather than quietly.
If there is something on this page you want evidence for, email info@hungrypaws.pet and ask. We would rather answer the question than have you wonder.
