About
Welcome To Clear Conscience Pet: Award-Winning All-Natural Pet Nutrition
Clear Conscience Pet® was founded in 2010 to create holistically formulated, cleanly sourced, and artisan prepared nutritional products for dogs and cats. The company is family-owned and was started by two pioneers of the natural pet food movement with over twenty years of experience in the field. Their dream and vision was to follow a philosophy of uncompromising quality, ethics, and dedication to animals to go far beyond the products of the past and reinvent in all categories to set a new standard for the future.
Anthony and Amanda are the only founding team in the pet industry led by a Pet Industry Icon Winner and a Woman of Influence Award-Winner.
Anthony Bennie is the Founder and Chief Nutrition Officer of Clear Conscience Pet® and the inventor of SuperGravy® Pet Food Toppers. He has been a pioneer in the natural pet nutrition movement since the early 1990s, and he is the most awarded product formulator in the industry. Anthony is a frequently published writer and speaker on pet nutrition and the global pet care business. Clear Conscience Pet is the most awarded brand in animal nutrition with 21 awards including the 2015 “Pet Industry Icon” award and the 2018 Family Choice Award. His article, “Is it Time for a Pet Food Divorce?” appeared in the March 2018 issue of Animal Wellness magazine, and he has two books slated for publication in 2019, “Confessions of a Dog Food Salesman” and “The Dog Rules: How Dogs Can Teach Us to Be Better Humans."
Amanda Malone Bennie is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Clear Conscience Pet. Amanda was a pioneering retailer in the holistic pet space as the Manager of Earth Animal in Westport, Connecticut. She personally helped to pioneer the natural pet food movement and counseled thousands of consumers to transition to natural foods in her ten years with the company. In 2017, Amanda was selected as a “Woman of Influence in the Pet Industry,” one of the most prestigious awards in the pet care business.
Our Story
The pet nutrition industry is enormous, and it’s daunting for the average animal lover to distinguish between companies, brands, products, ingredients, and philosophies. So we want to tell you who we are, why we do what we do, and where we came from on the path to this mission.
Clear Conscience Pet® is 100% family-owned and operated by Founders Anthony and Amanda Bennie, who are natural pet food industry veterans. Both have been in the business since the early 1990s and were fortunate to be a part of the earliest days of the natural and holistic pet food “revolution.”
After helping other companies to grow successful, in 2010 Tony and Amanda started Clear Conscience Pet® to bring a vision to life. That vision was of a company devoted to educating people about animal nutrition, to making animals healthier and happier with exceptionally nutritious products, and to being an independent voice for truth and transparency in the pet food and treats business.
We were troubled by the reality that, instead of the natural pet nutrition business evolving to the higher levels of quality, ethics, and transparency for which we had strived, the business had taken a wrong turn. “Natural pet” became such a huge moneymaker that it attracted mega corporations and Wall Street financiers in droves, and absent any deeply held VALUES they used the “buzz words” of natural nutrition to make low quality products look good and mediocre products look great. In short, the old tricks of the commercial pet food business hadn’t disappeared; they had simply morphed into new “natural” tricks.
These tricks of the trade are marketing and advertising saturation combined with “creative” ingredient lists that superficially appear to be examples of quality pet nutrition, when in truth they cheapen the cost of manufacturing the products and diminish their nutritional value. This “trickery” makes choosing truly healthy products for dogs and cats very difficult for even the most engaged consumers.
We founded Clear Conscience Pet® so we could do the RIGHT thing for animals and their human guardians. We don’t answer to any bosses except the animals and humans that trust us to give them CLEAR information and genuinely healthy products. Someone with real expertise and experience in the pet nutrition business needed to have the courage stand up and lift the veil of marketing hype that confuses consumers; we’re trying hard to be that company and those people.
Clear Conscience Pet isn’t just a “feel good, catchy name.” We founded our company to be a platform for education, transparency, and honesty in the pet nutrition business. Instead of assessing “market trends” and fitting products into a cookie cutter mold, Clear Conscience is an inventor and incubator of new ideas based on firm beliefs about pet nutrition. Those ideas and beliefs are then expressed in our products.
EVERYTHING WE MAKE FOR PETS MUST CONTRIBUTE TO THEIR HEALTH AND HAPPINESS WITHOUT COMPROMISE. This is not just our business mission, it’s our personal passion, and we’ll settle for nothing less.
Co-Founder Anthony is a 22 year veteran of the industry who writes and speaks frequently in the media and is never afraid to challenge the status quo. Talks like “Confessions of a Dog Food Salesman” and “Jerked Around: The Truth About the Chinese Treat Controversy” show this independence in action. Anthony has also written for years in magazines and online about serious pet nutritional topics. A sampling of his recent articles can be seen here.
So that’s our story. We’re family people with the same hopes and dreams as our customers for a safe and secure future for our children, and a deeply spiritual attachment and connection to our dogs and cats. We were blessed to become part of this business that we love over 20 years ago, and feel very lucky to be able to practice this calling with vigor, vision, and integrity.
The biggest privilege and honor that we can achieve is the TRUST of our customer family. We promise NEVER to betray that trust, and ALWAYS to say what we mean, and mean what we say.
With warmest regards to our customers and their animal companions,
Anthony and Amanda Bennie