Josera means passion - for our dogs, cats and horses, for super premium quality and for sustainable solutions. As a specialist in pet food, we bring over 80 years of experience to the table. And our team uses this to provide our four-legged friends with the food they need throughout their lives: from puppies, kittens or foals to seniors, from leisurely connoisseurs to athletes - even with very special requirements.
The best recipes, high-quality ingredients, modern, climate-neutral production and continuous quality controls in our own accredited laboratory ensure that we meet the highest demands - and that the food in the bowl is acceptable and compatible.
That is Josera - petfood with passion.
This is what Frank Erbacher (family entrepreneur of Erbacher the food family) has to say
“We make sustainable nutrition - but what does that mean? It is affordable and wholesome. What we need is simple and healthy food that nourishes us and that we can enjoy – it is created and made in a way that respects the climate and nature.
We at Erbacher the food family are visionaries and pioneers of sustainable nutrition. We are working to ensure that our products are increasingly climate-neutral and that animals do not compete with humans for food. At the same time, nutrition that can be sustained in the future is also a sustainable business model for anyone who works in the field.
We are a family business and enjoy working with other family businesses in the value chain. We also go beyond the boundaries of our own value chain by taking our climate responsibility further. We consider aspects that lie outside the climate impact of our own products in order to achieve ecological, social and economic sustainability, especially in disadvantaged rural regions.”
This is what Stephan Hoose (CEO Josera petfood) has to say
We believe there are many layers to sustainability. It goes from dealing with employees, such as sustainable further development of individual areas of responsibility, to the development of new packaging or the reduction of resources.
Sustainability is firmly anchored in our DNA: this runs through all our brands in the pet food sector, with our personal commitment to many foundation projects - not forgetting the Ntakata Mountains forest conservation project in Tanzania. As sustainability is an integral part of our philosophy, we have naturally continued to work on and adhere to it even during the COVID-19 crisis. In line with the food industry as a whole, this state of emergency has not led to a drop in sales for us. The sufficient supply of raw materials has become more challenging, but has been ensured at all times through adequate risk and process management.
Personally, I would be very pleased if other companies also took their responsibility as we do in the food family. This is the only way we can make a lasting difference without political and private pressure - even in challenging times like a global pandemic.”
Frequently asked questions
Company
Feeding with Josera means getting “pet food with passion”. These words express our passion for the recipes we use to produce high-quality food for dogs, cats and horses. As a German specialist in first-class pet food, we can look back at over 80 years of experience and expertise. In 1941, Joseph and Pauline Erbacher founded a production plant for feed lime. With this they have laid the foundation for our company today. What many do not know: Our name JOSERA goes back to the initials of JOSef ERbacher Agrar.
In 1988, we thought: With this expertise and experience, we can certainly make pets happy and provide them with great petfood. More than 30 years of experience and positive feedback from our customers have shown that it works! Since then, we at Josera have been working with passion to develop new, innovative solutions for the well-being of your pets.
Our responsibility towards animals, people and the environment is always at the forefront of our minds. Animal welfare and the harmony between the pet owners and their pets are our motivation. Your pet’s health, outstanding taste, excellent digestibility and compatibility has highest priority in our Super Premium nutrition for dogs and cats.
In 3 words: *Avoid*, *Reduce*, "Offset*.
Wherever possible, we completely avoid CO2 emissions by finding climate-neutral solutions, adopting new approaches or changing old habits. Of course, it isn't possible to completely avoid CO2 emissions. But wherever emissions are inevitable, we reduce them to the absolute minimum. Any remaining CO2 emissions that cannot be avoided are offset through our climate and forest conservation projects in Tanzania.
To integrate these three principles in our everyday work, Josera has taken the following steps:
- Electricity generation thanks to the outstanding primary energy efficiency of our power facilities
- Product warehousing in high-bay storage facilities made from PEFC-certified wood from regional forestry
- Environmentally friendly movement of goods, and short transportation distances
- Sustainable building projects based on natural materials
- Environmentally friendly air filtration using a biobed
- Promotion of sustainable travel for all our staff by using e-bikes
As always, our goal is to be constantly improving, trying to take even more responsibility when it comes to the environment, animals and people!
If you would like to find out more, please visit our sustainability page: https://josera.com/en/sustainability
When developing our packaging, two things are always super important to us: On the one hand, the bags used should naturally keep the food inside fresh, isolate odours and not become greasy. On the other, we want to keep our environment in mind at all times and focus on more sustainable ideas and solutions.
Our 15 kg bags are made up of several layers: The bag itself is made of paper and has an inner coating of plastic. This is essential to ensure that the bag is safe for transport, suitable for long-term storage and can guarantee the perfect quality of the food. Even the practical zip lock on some of our 15 kg bags is not yet optimised in terms of sustainability - but it helps our customers to keep the food fresh for their pet.
When it comes to minimising the environmental impact of our packaging, we are thus faced with a real balancing act: “As little as possible, as much as necessary.” Our product quality needs to be maintained for as long as possible and the goods need to find a safe way into households. And at the same time, for economic and ecological reasons, we want to continually reduce packaging material and use reusable materials. Where so many factors interact in a complex way, our only option is to prioritise goals. We have done this and in future we will concentrate on the recyclability of our containers when it comes to final packaging. We also want to focus more on the carbon footprint of the packaging materials we use and examine whether we can add the resulting emissions to our offsetting responsibility. We strive constantly to find new, more sustainable ways to do this, and of course we never forget what is important to you as the end consumer.
We do not conduct any animal testing in the development of our pet food. This means that no classical feeding experiments are carried out on ‘laboratory animals’. To ensure that your four-legged friend is optimally nourished with our food, we abide by international standard values for the nutritional requirements of pets.
Quality
High-quality pet food must not only taste good to our four-legged friends, but also be digestible. That's why our high-quality recipes are developed by a team of nutritionists, veterinarians and agronomists. Our experts are always fully up to date and pick up on the latest findings “from latest studys”.
At Josera, we therefore do everything we can to produce nothing less than the best pet food. We do so without any genetic engineering, animal testing without artificial colour, flavour and preservatives - but in a sustainable, responsible way that is good for our animals. We only use high-quality ingredients that are as natural as possible in our recipes and do not use any soya at all.
For us, the focus is not only on compatibility and best acceptance by the four-legged friend, but also on catering for animals with special needs. We address , among others, allergies and intolerances with our wide range of species-appropriate and optimally balanced recipes.
To ensure that the quality of our pet food always meets our own high criteria, we even have our own accredited laboratory at our production site. Here, around 20 food chemists, biologists and laboratory technicians work hand in hand and examine all incoming raw materials before they are processed according to the highest quality standards. In addition, they also check the outgoing products once again before they leave the factory.
We are also the proud holders of the following seals of approval and certificates:
- The IFS Food Standard is a standard recognised by the GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) for the auditing of food manufacturers. The focus is on food safety and quality.
- Ökotest put 11 of our puppy foods to the test, four of which received the test mark ‘very good’ - including our Josera YoungStar.
- The DLG is an organisation of the German agricultural and food industry. The DLG standard is intended to help adequately assess the sustainability performance of farms and their products.
We use different types of protein sources in our recipes to meet the needs of our four-legged friends in a species-appropriate way. In our dry food, we use meat meal because its nutritional value makes it very suitable for use in animal food. In addition to a high protein content, it also provides amino acids and fats. Our poultry protein contains dried meat, for example, but also offal and, to a lesser extent, bones, which are important for ensuring an optimal supply of calcium.
Meat meal is therefore in no way inferior to fresh meat in terms of nutrients and digestibility! Animals also find it delicions. We mainly use poultry, lamb and duck as animal protein sources, but we also have exotic species in our range, including insects.
We process dried animal protein in our Josera dog and cat food. This contains about 80% protein and fat. Fresh meat, on the other hand, contains about 80% water.
In the production of dry food with fresh meat, high amounts of fresh meat are often declared and also used in the recipe, which at first looks like an enormous amount of meat to you as a customer. But one must not forget that 80 % water evaporates during extrusion, which means that proportionately more fresh meat must be used to achieve the same effect as with dried protein.
Good to know:
The fresh meat from which our dried animal protein is obtained comes exclusively from slaughterhouses that also process meat for human consumption. Animals that are rejected by the veterinarian as unfit for human consumption after slaughter (e.g. due to illness) are not used in our animal food. We thoroughly test every ingredient - and thus also every meat meal - before it is released, so you don't have to worry about your four-legged friend getting food that isn't fit for human consumption or is made from inferior ingredients.
Here are a few tips:
- A cool storage place is best. The word “cool” is relative and does not mean that the food has to be kept in the fridge.
- Seal the food airtight and store it in a dry and rather dark place.
- Ideally, the food should not be affected by any foreign odours. Your four-legged friend has a very sensitive nose and foreign odours could lead to acceptance problems.
- Feel free to use a resealable feeding tray. But make sure you wash it with hot water before each refilling in order to prevent mites from entering the food.
As a family business, we attach great importance to maintaining long-term partnerships with suppliers who act in a similarly forward-looking manner as we do. The origin of the raw materials used also plays a major role. The majority of our raw materials come from Europe. However, this is not possible for all ingredients. For example, the New Zealand green-lipped mussel cannot come from Europe and the rice cannot come from Germany. Moreover, since our food constantly meets the highest quality standards, we have to think a little further ahead about buying regional products where this is necessary and ecologically sensible. We asses this ecological dimension by looking at the Product Environmental and Product Carbon Footprints of our sourced raw materials. In this respect, it is evident that it is not always the transport routes that have the greatest impact on the environment, but in many cases alternative forms of cultivation or husbandry are deciding factors.
We would like to explain this with the example of salmon: In this case, after the joint assessment of the PEF, we decided to use so-called by-products from Norwegian aquaculture. We know that aquacultures can have a major negative impact on the environment, but we now believe that preserving the biodiversity of the oceans by not using wild catches is more important.
We could go on and on with such examples, and the decisions in individual cases are definitely not getting any easier, as we are increasingly concerned with the upstream environmental impact of the raw materials we buy. We are, however, rising to the challenge and continue to work on ourselves, our products and the processes that shape our selection of suppliers and raw materials.
The meat used for our products comes exclusively from slaughterhouses. All animals delivered there are fit for human consumption. In the slaughterhouses, the meat is separated according to various criteria. First, the prime cuts (in the case of chicken, generally only breast and thigh) are separated and packaged for retail or further processed.
Parts that are healthy and suitable for consumption, but are not used in Germany due to low demand, are processed to make animal food. These parts include offal, necks, and to a small extent bones, but NOT mainly feathers, beaks and claws, as these are very difficult to digest and would result in your four-legged friend producing large piles of faeces.
Animals that are rejected by the veterinarian as unfit for human consumption after slaughter (e.g. due to illness) are not used in our animal food. We thoroughly test every ingredient - and thus also all meat - before it is released, so you don't have to worry about your four-legged friend getting food that isn't fit for human consumption or is made from inferior ingredients.
In other words, the same criteria apply to the meat that goes into pet food production as to those that go into the food industry.