FAIRFIELD, CALIF. — As a certified veterinary technician, Lindsay Meyers always kept the best interests of the pets she cared for top of mind — their health and wellbeing first and foremost. Now, as vice president of Quality, Nutrition and Compliance for Primal Pet Foods, Meyers is making sure their nutrition is also a top priority.

Producing raw and minimally processed food that’s safe for dogs and cats is a companywide mission at Primal Pet Group, one that Meyers has been striving to meet since she joined the company 10 years ago.

“I think formulation and compliance are my favorite parts of the job — that’s what I fell in love with early on,” Meyers said. “I love understanding how to make food safe, how to make it balanced and how to make it beneficial to dogs and cats while still having the benefit of minimally processed food.”

In the following Q&A, Meyers shares how her passion for solving puzzles led her toward veterinary medicine and later to Primal Pet Group all in an effort to help pets live healthier and happier lives.

PFP: How did you get your start in the pet industry, and how did that experience lead you to where you are now?

Meyers: I wanted to be a veterinarian since the first time I understood that it was a job. I was in love with animals before I could walk or talk. I was very interested in veterinary medicine right out of the gate. Unlike a lot of my peers and colleagues who were studying veterinary medicine because they loved puppies and kittens, for me it was more about the puzzle of medicine. As a veterinarian, your patient can’t communicate what’s wrong with them, so you have to figure it out like a puzzle. And that’s what I love — I love a complicated puzzle like that. 

I fell in love with working in veterinary medicine, it’s all I wanted to do my entire life. I worked at veterinary clinics from the second I could start working. I volunteered there in middle school and then started working at a vet practice when I was 14 years old and stayed working there throughout high school and college. I got my veterinary technician license so that I could work in the vet clinic while finishing school. I finished my pre vet/animal science bachelor’s degree and was getting ready to apply to veterinary school when my husband and I found out that we were pregnant with my first child, which made that plan take a back seat for a bit. I ended up managing veterinary practices.

What led me to Primal was that my dog Max had a lot of concurrent health problems, which I tried to manage with food and medicine for many years. He had a bad pancreatic disease and heart disease and gastrointestinal disease. A colleague from veterinary technician school suggested trying raw food. She sent me a bag of Primal to try and I fed it to Max and honestly, it fixed him immediately. It changed his life, which changed my life. It also changed the perspective of the veterinarian I was working for at the time, and we started recommending Primal to other clients who had pets with similar health problems. 

When my Primal sales rep left on maternity leave, the opportunity to join the company and move into sales came up. So, in 2015 I joined Primal to manage Northeast sales and distribution — and I loved it. Soon my colleagues at Primal realized I was good at interacting with veterinarians. If there was a veterinarian that was close by a pet store or influential in a community and was fearful of raw food, they would have me reach out and arm them with the information they needed to talk about the benefits of raw pet food. For a short time, I helped Primal work on veterinary education and outreach, and then I moved into compliance, product development, nutrition and formulation. I took over the quality department in early 2023 and now I lead the three teams —nutrition and formulation, food safety and quality assurance (FSQA), and regulatory and compliance. I think formulation and compliance are my favorite parts of the job — that’s what I fell in love with early on. I love understanding how to make food safe, how to make it balanced and how to make it beneficial to dogs and cats while still having the benefit of minimally processed food.

PFP: What has been your biggest challenge — personal or professional — related to your work in the pet industry?

Meyers: I think finding a work-life balance is a challenge for me, and always has been. When you love your job this much, it can be challenging to find a balance. I burned myself out when I worked in vet-med because I could never do that job remotely. I felt like I had to be there all the time and when my children were really young, that was really hard. In this job, I travel a lot for work and sometimes it’s intense, so it’s nice that I have the opportunity to work from home. But when I’m home, I try to only work in my office space and when I’m out in the rest of my house, I try to leave work to the side. It was really hard to develop that balance, especially coming from a clinic setting to this. Developing those boundaries and making sure you have a good work-life balance can be difficult, especially when you love your job. But it’s worth it.

PFP: Tell me about a professional accomplishment in the pet industry that you are proud of.

Meyers: My biggest accomplishment has been my work with engaging and educating veterinarians. I have a greeting card that’s signed by one of the classes of veterinary students at UC Davis that I went and spoke to years ago. I spoke to the class about raw food and what we do to make it safe and balanced. We discussed why it’s such a huge growing segment and what sort of questions they should ask in the exam room to make sure pet parents understand what’s important about feeding raw food. The class wrote me this incredible thank you card, they appreciated that I helped educate them about this important topic — it meant a lot to me.

I also have a photo somewhere of the first booth I worked by myself at the American Veterinary Medical Association conference. I convinced the company we needed to get in front of more veterinarians to talk to them about what we do. I had some incredible conversations with veterinarians about the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) Guidelines. Even just a few years ago, raw food and freeze-dried pet food was not well known or understood. We had to explain what it was, and what we do to keep it safe. The veterinarians I spoke with were so interested. They would ask me questions and take the samples with them. So many reached out afterward to share how their cat broke into the bag of samples to get to the freeze-dried nugget or how their dog would no longer eat his food unless it had the product crumbled on top. I think breaking into the veterinary space and helping them understand what we do has been my favorite accomplishment. I think it’s so important to make sure your veterinarian is able to answer questions when it comes to raw and minimally processed foods.

PFP: What is top of mind for you and/or your business in the industry right now?

Meyers: For us and most of the industry, I think food safety is number one. Making raw and minimally processed food that’s safe for our consumers and their pets is extremely important. It’s our main focus because we want to make pets healthier through our nutrition, not make them or their parents sick. But there’s a lot of pressure from consumers who don’t want additives or heat treatments. There are a lot of things that can make your food safer from a microbiological perspective. But there’s so much misinformation out there and much fear of new technologies and processes. I think in some ways being a good scientist or being a good consumer means you should be skeptical of things like new technologies. When HPP (high pressure processing) first came out, it was scary to some consumers. People didn’t understand it. It was a new technology and now we know that HPP can be incredibly effective and beneficial. There are a lot of ways that we can apply food safety technologies to foods and not interrupt the things that make those minimally processed food beneficial to us. It just takes time, research and tweaking to get it just right. 

“There’s a balance between doing what’s right from a regulatory perspective and what’s right from a food safety and compliance perspective,” said Lindsay Meyers of Primal Pet Foods.

There’s a balance between doing what’s right from a regulatory perspective and what’s right from a food safety and compliance perspective. And then combining that with what a consumer wants is a huge challenge. You also have to balance cost with that. The more complicated these processes are, the more cost that’s associated with them. And, consumers need to be able to afford these foods. When we go through our goals as a company, safety is always at the top of our list and always has been. But it is a challenge to balance food safety with consumer demand and cost and research.

PFP: If you could pick three trends influencing the industry today, which are the most important and why?

Meyers: First, the trend toward less processed, more holistic feeding is still happening in the human space, as well as in the pet space, and it isn’t going away. It’s really accelerated. It’s evolved over the years, but it’s not going anywhere. People want transparency. They want to understand what’s going into the bag of pet food. They want to make sure they can pronounce all the ingredients on the back. I think that’s driving the success of our business. 

Another is the human-animal bond — treating your pet as if it’s a human being. That definitely drives trends when it comes to pet food. I am definitely the most guilty of that behavior, so I can’t fault anybody else for doing it. I travel with my smallest dog; he comes with me to the plant. My dogs are part of my family. 

Another trend is customization or personalization. If you were a veterinarian, you couldn’t treat a Chihuahua the same way that I would treat a working dog like a Bernese Mountain dog. So there is something to be said for personalization of pet food. Whether you have an active working dog or a little couch potato or a dog that travels with you, each pet has different needs. That personalization of pet food ties back to the human-animal bond, and treating pets like members of our families.

PFP: What is something about the pet industry that people outside of the industry may not realize?

Meyers: I think it’s interesting that people don’t understand the differences in the regulation of pet food versus human food. We, at Primal, and in the pet food industry, don’t have the same regulatory and quality standards as raw chicken that you would buy at the grocery store and no one outside the industry understands that. When I start to talk to people about what I do for a living, their minds are blown. After a recent large recall of human meat, my brother said, “Sounds like your pet food plant that’s making dog food is more sophisticated and safer than this one making human food.”

We have a zero-tolerance policy in our plants. We can’t have any Salmonella or E. coli or Listeria in our facilities — no DNA presence of it in our food at all. I don’t think consumers understand that. In fact, I’ve met a lot of people in the pet industry who don’t understand that. I think that’s the biggest misconception. We do a great job in this country of making pet food safe — that’s the reason we export so much of it. There are a lot of countries around the world that trust the pet food made here in North America. I think it’s fascinating how many people don’t realize how much we put into making pet food safe. 

PFP: What advice would you give to other women in this industry?

Meyers: I always tell people to just be themselves. I want women who want to break into this type of job in the pet industry to know that there’s space for them here. There are plenty of opportunities for women in pet food. But, don’t put yourself in a box. If you get out into the veterinary space or into the pet care space and you find a little niche segment of it that you love, explore it.  If you find a passion for another part of the industry, follow it. There are so many opportunities to learn and to grow. Ask around and figure out where those opportunities are and where you can make a difference. Just keep trying to find out where you fit, and be yourself.

PFP: Just for fun, do you consider yourself a dog person or a cat person? Or, if you have pets of your own, tell us a little bit about them. 

Lindsay Meyers and her beloved dog Mo. | Source: Lindsay Meyers

Meyers: I am definitely a dog person. I love cats, and if my husband was not allergic, we would definitely have cats — I always had cats growing up and loved them. But I am for sure a dog person. I have three rescue dogs right now — three scruffy looking mutts. Eddie’s the big one. He’s from the Bahamasand was a feral island dog. Larry’s our oldest dog. He’s a scruffy little Terrier looking thing, rescued from Texas. He’s the best dog — he never does anything wrong. Monty is the little one that’s naughty and travels with me. He’s a little Jack Russell mix thing from a shelter in Alabama.

Lindsay Meyers is vice president of Quality, Nutrition and Compliance for Primal Pet Foods, where she oversees all aspects of quality assurance, product nutrition and formulation, and regulatory affairs. As a certified veterinary technician and active member of The American Academy of Veterinary Nutrition (AAVN) and New Hampshire Veterinary Technician Association (NHVTA), Meyers has spent more than 15 years practicing veterinary medicine across emergency, critical care, and exotic and small animal general practice. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Animal Science Pre-Veterinary Medicine from the University of New Hampshire Durham. Meyers, her husband, and two children share their New England home with three one-of-a-kind rescue dogs.

Continue reading about other female leaders featured in our Women in the Pet Industry series.