From Kitchen Scraps to a Billion-Dollar Market: Is Bone Broth’s Sustainability Story Still True?

Bone broth built its reputation on a simple, satisfying idea — nothing goes to waste. What the butcher couldn’t sell, the kitchen could simmer into something nourishing. It was upcycling before anyone called it that. Now that the industry is worth over a billion dollars, that origin story deserves a closer look.

Revisiting Bone Broth’s Zero-Waste Origins

For most of human history, bones never made it to the trash. Families simmered them after a roast, butchers passed them off to neighbors, and the whole practice was just normal. Nobody called it sustainable. It was simply common sense.

That logic hasn’t gone anywhere. The United States wastes nearly 60 million tons of food annually, meaning any habit that diverts something from the waste stream is genuinely worth doing. When you toss a chicken carcass in a stockpot instead of the garbage, the environmental benefit is real and straightforward.

Freezing bones between cooking sessions makes that even more doable in practice, slowing bacterial growth so scraps stay safe until you’ve collected enough for a batch. It’s a small habit that makes zero-waste broth accessible even for people who don’t cook a whole animal every week.

Small brands that source bones directly from local butchers operate on a similar principle. If the butcher would otherwise pay to have the bones hauled away, and a broth maker picks them up instead, that’s a genuine diversion from the waste stream. The material had nowhere to go. Broth gave it somewhere. That version of the story is still true. The question is what happens when you try to scale it.

Examining the Sustainability of an Industrial Scale

The global bone broth market was valued at around $1.08 billion in 2023 and is on track to hit $1.62 billion by 2030, driven by mainstream retail, the sustained popularity of paleo and keto eating and growing interest in collagen as a functional ingredient.

At that volume, bones aren’t an afterthought anymore. They’re a commodity with real market value, which changes the sustainability math considerably.

The EU Waste Framework Directive makes a distinction that’s useful here. A by-product is something that comes out of a production process but was never going to be thrown away. Waste is what has no other use. When bones become valuable enough to trade as a commodity, they stop functioning like waste. They become a co-product of the meat industry — one with its own supply chain, pricing, and procurement infrastructure.

Food policy researchers have flagged this tension. The EU’s food use hierarchy, which aims to keep food materials at their highest possible value rather than disposing of them, distinguishes between using something that would genuinely have been discarded and creating a new demand stream around a material that was already finding uses. The first prevents waste. The second builds a market.

That doesn’t automatically make commercial bone broth unsustainable. However, it does mean the claim deserves more scrutiny than a label typically offers. A large broth brand buying bones at market rate from an industrial processor is doing something quite different from a small producer picking up carcasses a butcher couldn’t move. Both technically use byproducts, but only one actually diverts something from the waste stream.

Investigating the Modern Bone Supply Chain

Where the bones come from matters just as much as whether they count as byproducts. Commercial broth draws from two very different parts of the agricultural system, and the environmental differences between them are significant.

Regenerative and Pasture-Raised Sources

Bones from regenerative or pasture-raised operations arrive with a fuller context. Regenerative agriculture, which centers on improving soil health, supporting biodiversity, and sequestering carbon through practices like rotational grazing, produces animals whose entire life cycle has a lower environmental footprint. When those bones end up in a broth, the by-product is part of a system that actively improves the land rather than just extracting from it.

Kettle and Fire has committed to sourcing a million pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef bones from regenerative farms, and to use Certified Humane and Global Animal Partnership certifications to verify its suppliers. Their case is that consumer demand for regenerative broth can give farmers a financial reason to transition more land away from conventional methods, essentially putting broth sales to work as a land stewardship tool.

FOND Bone Broth went further in 2023, launching a Land to Market-verified product line. That program measures actual ecological outcomes, such as soil carbon levels and biodiversity, rather than just confirming that a farm uses certain methods. It’s outcomes-based accountability, not just marketing language.

These sourcing models are gaining attention because they link the product to a verifiable upstream impact. They’re not just avoiding harm. They’re connecting the purchase to something measurably better.

Conventional Feedlot Sources

The situation looks different for broth sourced from conventional concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. About 90% of U.S. meat and eggs come from these facilities, so a large share of the bones in mass-market broth products come from there.

Using those bones redirects a material that would otherwise cost money to dispose of. That part is accurate. But it also puts money into a system that generates around 335 million tons of manure annually in the U.S., alongside documented greenhouse gas emissions and water quality impacts.

“We use byproducts” is technically true in either case. What that phrase doesn’t tell you is that the by-product carries the footprint of the system that made it. Buying broth from CAFO bones solves a small disposal problem and funds a much larger operation with high environmental costs. Generic upcycling language doesn’t capture that distinction, which is why reading further than the front of the label matters.

Decoding Labels for Conscious Consumers

If you’re buying bone broth with sustainability in mind, the label is all you have to go on. Here’s what the most common claims actually mean, and where they fall short.

“Made from Upcycled Ingredients”

This one has a real standard behind it. The Upcycled Food Association runs the Upcycled Certified mark, the only third-party certification for upcycled foods globally. To earn it, a brand has to document through its supply chain that the ingredients were genuinely diverted from a waste stream.

That matters. But the certification says nothing about how those animals were raised. A product can carry the Upcycled Certified mark and still source entirely from conventional feedlots. It verifies diversion from waste, not what happened upstream.

“Grass-Fed and Finished”

This is one of the more useful labels for sustainability purposes, with an important catch. The term grass-fed alone is no longer federally regulated. The USDA withdrew its formal grass-fed marketing claim in 2016, meaning it can technically appear on a label with little to back it up.

“Grass-fed and finished” is more specific — the animal ate grass and forage for its entire life, with no grain at the end. Pair that with third-party certification from organizations like the American Grassfed Association or A Greener World, and you have something worth trusting. That combination is the closest you’ll get to a regenerative sourcing signal on a typical supermarket shelf.

“USDA Organic”

Organic certification requires cattle to graze on certified-organic pasture, eat 100% organic feed and be raised without unapproved antibiotics or synthetic growth hormones. For broth buyers concerned about chemical residues, that’s a meaningful guarantee.

What it doesn’t promise is healthy land. An organic operation can still run monocultures and deplete its soil over time, as long as it avoids the prohibited inputs. Organic and regenerative overlap, but they aren’t the same thing. Regenerative Organic Certification, built on top of USDA Organic and developed with the Rodale Institute, adds requirements for soil health and farmworker welfare, making it the most rigorous standard currently available.

What to Actually Look For

Single claims rarely tell the full story. Look for combinations, such as grass-fed and finished alongside a third-party animal welfare certification, or organic with regenerative verification. Brands that identify agricultural partners or publish sourcing reports are worth a second look, because that level of transparency is harder to fake than a buzzword on packaging.

Rethinking a Sustainable Staple

Bone broth’s zero-waste story was always most honest at a small scale — a stockpot, a local butcher, a closed loop. That model still exists and works. What’s changed is that the same product now moves through a billion-dollar supply chain, and whether any given carton lives up to its sustainability claims depends entirely on where those bones came from. The upcycling premise hasn’t disappeared, but it’s no longer something to take on faith.