If you'd rather read, here's the transcript for this video:
Let’s talk sustainability!
The first question you might be wondering is why does sustainability matter for our pets? Well, According to a UCLA study 25-30% of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the US is due to our dogs and cats.
In fact, if the 163 million dogs and cats in the US had their own country – they’d rank 5th in global meat consumption!
Our dogs alone are eating over 32 billion pounds of protein per year and most of it is coming from traditional animal agriculture – absolutely not sustainable - we’re going to change that!
So, at Jiminy’s we make sustainable dog food using insect protein. The philosophy that guided our product roadmap has been to develop complementary products that address our consumer’s needs throughout all parts of the day – We want our consumers to have a nutritious and sustainable choice for products that they feel are essential for their pup!
Our products are delicious, nutritious, sustainable, humane and Hypoallergenic!
In this video I’m going to dive deep into the sustainability (because that’s what got us started in the first place)
Jiminy’s products are truly sustainable – they use exponentially less land, water and emit almost no greenhouse gases. Let’s break it down.
If you’ve got one acre of land and you put chickens on it, at the end of a year you’ll have 265 pounds of protein. But if you put crickets on that acre you’ll have 65,000 pounds of protein and if you raise grubs you’d have over a million pounds of protein at the end of the year!!
This is possible for a number of reasons – short lifecycle so you’re raising lots of generations over the course of a year. They reproduce at a high rate and they’re a naturally swarming species so they prefer to live together in close quarters. They’re grown indoors, so you can go vertical. This also means there is no ground water runoff polluting nearby water.
It also utilizes much less water. They get a lot of the water that they need from their food.
And then almost no greenhouse gases. 65% of nitrous oxide comes from animal agriculture – nitrous oxide has a global warming potential that is 296x greater than CO2 emissions (10x more than methane). Insect protein is so different here - Bugs don’t burp or pass gas…so a minimal amount of greenhouse gases generated when raising this protein source.
Insects have high feed conversion efficiencies. Feed conversion measures the efficiency with which the bodies of livestock convert feed into protein (the desired output). Insects are cold blooded and therefore when they eat the the food goes towards growth as opposed to heating their body.
Even the insect’s Frass has benefits. You can think of FRASS as the insect equivalent to manure. It’s a fantastic fertilizer – one of the things that I love about it is that it makes plants stronger. The plants detect the exoskeletons in the ground around them and prepare for defense. As a result they grow Thicker stalks, more flowers and fruit.
This is a rich subject. To recap, I think the most important points to remember are the ones we started with – Less land, less water, & fewer greenhouse gasses. I went into details because the details help explain why these three things are possible.
Less land, less water, & fewer greenhouse gasses.
Thank you for choosing Jiminy’s and helping us to reduce our dogs' carbon pawprints!