Our road to greener packaging

Here at The Innocent Pet, we continually take steps to improve as a business. From creating the paw-fect treats for your pets to our environmental impact as a company, we will always be a work-in-progress, as we believe that there is always room for improvement. We also think it's important to be transparent with our customers, about our plans and take you on the journey with us.

Handmade in our Yorkshire factory, our luxury treats are enjoyed by pets around the world today. It's crucial to us that our delicious doggy delicacies arrive safely, wherever our customers are based.

2013: The birth of The Innocent Hound

The Innocent Hound was founded by owner, Chloe, back in 2013. Her mission was to create healthy, nutritious treats for her dog Bongo, with an added touch of luxury. Quality, sustainability ad British ingredients were the core values of The Innocent Hound, which has remained the same over the last seven years.

The original range of The Innocent Hound consisted of three delicious venison products, as you can see in the photo above - and as some of you may remember well! Packed into pocket-sized tubs, the branding and packaging was as simple as the ingredients used in these luxury treats.

The early days of Innocent was all hands on deck, initially working out of the family kitchen. The plastic tubs used could be ordered in small quantities, stored safely and offered full product safety. By using cardboard sleeves, recipes could be tweaked, changed and new flavours could be added without the high costs of printed packaging.

2018: The Innocent Makeover

As The Innocent Hound grew to become The Innocent Pet, including cat and small animal treats, our packaging was transformed into the pouches your pets know and love today.

We listened to customer feedback asking for packaging that could be resealed, to help keep your pet's favourite treats tasting fresher for longer. By adding a resealable strip to our new packaging, owners could pop a pouch into their bags without worrying about furry noses stealing the sausages! 

By moving from the original plastic tubs, our plastic consumption was reduced by over 70%. We also improved product safety by changing to packaging that could not be damaged in transit.

Whilst the new pouches made an excellent replacement and helped towards reducing our impact on the environment, we still didn't think this was enough, as not all council authorities have access to recycle these pouches.

2019: Launching our first complete pet food

From the very start of The Innocent Hound, we have been regularly asked to make a complete food for your pets. In 2019, we were able to accomplish this long-awaited goal, and launched our very first air-dried complete food for dogs. By creating a brand new product, we had the chance to offer packaging that could be recycled by everyone - and we did! Our complete food packaging is 100% recyclable, and offers total product safety and quality. We even have a reseal strip that maintains delicious flavour and texture.

2020: Fast forward to today

We have been busy working hard behind the scenes to source packaging that can be fully recycled, in line with our complete food packaging.

We have trialled paper-based pouches with our Sliced Venison Sausage treats, as some of you may have seen for yourselves. These were a great start to moving into more environmentally friendly packaging, but they couldn't guarantee food safety, which is the most important factor for us as a business. We never want to sell anything that can't offer full product safety to our customers.

Our packaging will gradually begin to change across the year, as we introduce our new, 100% recyclable pouches. We will use up remaining packaging of our current pouches rather than throwing them away, as this would create significantly larger waste.

And so the journey continues...