Sustainability with CBD

Trust. That’s a pretty packed word and it’s hard earned. Over the last decade, we’ve worked hard to earn your trust and know that you rightfully have high standards for your pets and the environment.  Our standards are set just as high and we want to show you exactly how we care for your pet while extending a helping hand to Mother Nature. 

We’ve always been a transparent company whose products are formulated by veterinary professionals and where only the highest quality CBD supplements are shipped from our Washington state based manufacturing facility. Part of that quality is using organic ingredients but a larger part comes from the company culture we started building in 2014 with the design of our Mission Statement: 

• Continue research into the endocannabinoid system to improve animal quality of life and thus the human-animal bond. 
• Provide education and foster conversations between the public and medical professionals to advance this effort. 
• Maintain exemplary environmental standards and progressive business practices.

Let’s break that down so you can see how we honor it with our past, current and planned actions.

• Continue research into the endocannabinoid system to improve animal quality of life and thus the human-animal bond. Canna Companion was founded on real life use of CBD and other cannabis compounds in dogs and cats. Riley was our first patient, a beloved Rottweiler who had mobility concerns at a young age, and who helped us begin to understand exactly how the cannabis receptor system works. Through our professional connections within the veterinary cannabis research community, online consultations & customer service departments, and private veterinary medical practices, we continue to deepen that understanding so that our products optimally support your pet.  
• Provide education and foster conversations between the public and medical professionals to advance this effort. We believe strongly that knowledge should be shared and shared freely. All professional consultations are — and have been since inception — free of charge. We also offer free custom webinars for educational institutions, pet-centric organizations and Partner Program members. We actively pursue CBD research studies in less common pet species like rabbits and parrots through LSU College of Veterinary Medicine in order to push the envelope of knowledge in all species who can benefit from CBD administration.
• Maintain exemplary environmental standards and progressive business practices. We’re so passionate about this one, environmental impact and sustainability is in every decision we make, and we make sure a 3rd party evaluates us for transparency. In fact, Canna Companion received Pet Sustainability’s Accredited Top Performing company award three years in a row! From the evolution of our packaging (mylar to plastic to glass) to strict testing protocols to our long standing HR practices and now, following the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, we prove small business can have a big impact on our planet. Here are some of the details of what we do at Canna Companion to support Mother Earth. 

Sustainable Materials

Ingredients: We utilize only the best organic ingredients for our products and always have. Each ingredient must come with testing results to prove pesticide and heavy metal free claims. Hemp itself is a naturally sustainable agricultural product with low water needs. 

Packaging: While our internal recycling center helps catch packaging waste, with the newest evolution of our packaging we wanted to go one step further and utilize a material that is 100% recyclable indefinitely — glass. Glass also has the ability to better preserve some of the more volatile compounds (terpenes) in our products for extended shelf life without losing potency. Even our exterior packaging is made from 100% post-consumer paperboard. 

Office supplies: Most of what we do is electronic but when we need paper, we use tree-free paper that’s from carbon neutral manufacturers. Our manufacturing facility utilizes TerraCycle, ZeroWaste and The Blue Shoe Guy to recycle company-issued PPE, packaging materials, and hard-to-recycle plastic items. Employees are encouraged to bring things from home and they do … we’ve recycled over 450 lb of combined business and personal waste since 2020! We didn’t stop there, though.

Healthy, Happy Employees

Safe working environment: This is an area often overlooked in the manufacturing industry and one we can proudly say is well addressed in our facility. Some of the smaller things we do are use natural cleaners that are safer for our employees and products, and use station-centric LED lighting for reduced energy usage and less strain on employee eyesight. But perhaps the most impactful thing we do for our employees is maintain excellent air quality. The facility uses a combination of dehumidifier and HEPA filtered HVAC system to efficiently maintain strict humidity and temperature control. This prevents microbes from growing and utilizes high turnover rates to keep air fresh. We also monitor these efforts using the AirThinx monitoring system and can happily report our average air quality averages 2.0 ug/m3 PM2.5*. (*Refers to air particle sizes that are most harmful when inhaled; The EPA recommends a limit of 35 ug/m3.)

Work life balance: We understand how important it is to maintain a healthy work life balance and encourage our employees to find what works best for them. By providing custom schedules, utilizing shorter work weeks, offering accrued PTO and a living wage, we let our employees know work is important — but their personal lives matter more. Paid parental leave and health care coverage are also features all employees enjoy. 

Education and training: As part of our daily conversations and larger yearly meetings, we aim to educate and train our employees regarding progressive cultural practices like pronoun preferences, gender discrimination and cross-cultural communication. Being a woman-owned and operated small business means we understand how important it is to address all people respectfully and how they prefer to be addressed. We treat our employees respectfully and teach them how to return that respect to others they meet. 

Sustainable Partnerships

It’s not just about what we do but about who we associate with – who we support in our community’s efforts to keep our pets and planet healthy. We’ve chosen the following companies for just those reasons. 

• National Animal Supplement Council: As an NASC Primary supplier we can comfortably state our products are made in a regulatory compliant facility free from pesticides and other toxic chemicals. A rigorous qualification process ensures procedures are cGMP compliant and that we practice what we write down as policy. We expanded those requirements to a company-wide transparency policy, writing blogs regarding our processes, and providing batch-associated 3rd party test results online.
• Pet Sustainability Coalition: Going through the process of accreditation requires understanding where our business is today as well as where we need to go in terms of science-based improvement in our sustainable practices. We must develop and implement strategies to achieve our goals and monitor our progress so that future changes are sound. During this process, we were proud and pleased to learn Canna Companion’s procedures and daily business practices were all in top form – we only lacked documentation which was quickly developed.
• Veterinary Cannabis Society: When we sat down to choose a company Canna companion wanted to sponsor, we knew it had to be one that combined our education and science backgrounds with progressive business practices. Veterinary Cannabis Society fits the bill perfectly! They are a woman run company whose educational programs help teach new veterinary professionals about the science of cannabis therapy in veterinary medicine. VCS utilizes their extensive list of Board of Directors and staff members to promote legislation nationwide for healthy and safe cannabis regulation for all pets.

Moving Forward

We recently updated our Supplier Code of Conduct ensuring that the companies we source from not only use organic ingredients but that they treat their employees fairly and keep Mother Earth in mind during their business transactions. By 2025, Canna Companion will have its B Corp certification and look forward to pursuing a few more exotic pet CBD studies with LSU. You can always catch our latest environmental achievements in our downloadable yearly Sustainability Report (bottom of page).

Written by Sarah Brandon, DVM, CEO Canna Companion