Being a raw pet food company, we understandably get a lot of questions about our food safety practices. Most people’s understanding usually stops at: what “kill step” is used to eliminate pathogens, and whether batches are tested. While those aspects are undeniably important, we wanted to share about other areas that often get overlooked but make just as big of a difference in our product quality.
This post covers our practices at the time of writing, but can and will change in the future! Our process has evolved over the years and will continue to do so as we collect more data on our production and work with experts to explore new practices & guidelines.
Whether you’re a pet parent looking for more knowledge, a pet industry professional looking to advise clients, or a fellow pet food manufacturer looking to improve your own processes, we hope you find this informative! This post expands upon a video we shared that goes over our food safety practices.
Table of Contents
Sourcing Standards & Supplier Verification
We require all of our suppliers to undergo an extensive onboarding & verification process where they detail their food safety processes and send us documents to support their label claims, certifications, or programs.
Below are our sourcing standards:
All Ingredients
Human-grade: All of our ingredients are human-grade. For protein ingredients, that means it must be USDA inspected or equivalent if imported. Human grade ingredients are held to higher cleanliness standards when it comes to how the ingredient is processed & stored since they need to be fit for human consumption.
Non-human grade meat is typically frozen into “nude” blocks with no packaging and placed directly on a pallet.
Pallet of our raw ingredients. Human grade ingredients must be packaged to protect it from the environment.
Protein Ingredients
Raised with no growth promoting hormones or antibiotics: Unlike conventional farms that administers antibiotics/hormones to accelerate growth, we work with farms that only use antibiotics when medically necessary and under veterinary supervision. All livestock that receive antibiotics must also undergo a withdrawal period prior to slaughter to ensure that there are no residues.
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3rd Party Humane Handling Audits: We require our farms undergo 3rd party audits (Certified Humane, GAP, Humane Heartland etc) to make sure animals are raised in a way that minimizes stress and allows for natural behavior. Ex: providing perches & structures to climb in poultry barns, minimum space requirements per animal, adequate shelter & ventilation etc.
These audits also ensure the slaughter process is humane, all livestock are rendered unconscious before they’re dispatched, and place limits on the distance livestock can travel between the farm and processing facility. All of our farms raise their animals cage-free.
Fruits & Vegetables
Organic: All of our fruits & veggies are certified organic
Supplements
Heavy Metal & Microbiological Testing: Each batch of supplements we receive come with a Certificates of Analysis with test results for heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, and mercury. Supplements are also tested for microorganisms like Salmonella spp, E.coli, Coliforms, Yeasts & Molds and more.
Wild Harvested (Marine Ingredients): All of our marine ingredients—kelp, oysters, fish oil, mussels are wild harvested.
Testing Our Ingredients for Indicator Microorganisms
Our raw materials are regularly tested for indicator microorganisms to help us objectively evaluate our ingredient quality.
When people think about whether an ingredient is high-quality, they usually think about qualitative aspects like whether it's organic, pasture-raised, non-GMO etc. However, we also have a quantitative way of evaluating quality and we take the extra step of testing the levels of indicator microorganisms in our raw materials
We test for microorganisms involved in spoilage, found in fecal matter (remember, manure is used as fertilizer), and bacterial families that contain harmful pathogen species. Their levels give us clues as to how well our ingredients were washed, how quickly our supplier processed and froze them, and if they encountered any potential sources of contamination before delivery. Monitoring these levels are important for two main reasons:
1. Choosing higher quality suppliers. This data helps us choose farms that provide cleaner ingredients. For example, the data below shows test results for organic green beans from 2 different suppliers and you can see that Supplier A has much lower levels of Enterobacteriaceae (bacteria family that includes Salmonella and harmful E.coli species), Lactic Acid Bacteria (indicates spoilage), and Total Coliforms (bacteria family commonly found in GI and includes harmful E.coli). This helps us objectively choose the better supplier with cleaner ingredients for your pets!
The results are displayed in scientific notation so we’re looking at about <10 cfu/g of Total Coliforms with Supplier A vs. 22,000 (2.20E4) cfu/g for Supplier B
2. Ensures that your pathogen mitigation technology is sufficient. In a previous post, we discussed how every food safety technology has a limit to the level of bacterial contamination it can handle. That’s why it’s important to test your raw materials to ensure they do not exceed those limits.
Example: Uf your process can only get rid of 1,000 cfu/g of pathogens, you need to make sure your raw materials don’t arrive with more than 10 cfu/g (safety factor of 100x).
Kill Steps & Hurdles
We use pathogen-eliminating probiotics as our primary method for pathogen control
These probiotic strains have been specifically selected and cultivated for their ability to target and eliminate harmful pathogens like Salmonella spp., E. coli O157:H7, and Listeria monocytogenes. Some of these strains produce natural antimicrobial compounds, others bind to receptors on pathogens and inactivate them, and overall, they outcompete and eliminate bad bacteria.
We’ve written extensively about the different food safety technologies we’ve evaluated and one of the most important takeaways is that the effectiveness of any technology varies depending on your product matrix and how you apply it. That’s why it’s important for manufacturers to run validation studies with whatever technology they’ve chosen to make sure it’s effective with their recipes and processes.
We’ve conducted validation studies with our probiotics on all three pathogens listed above, and we’re currently running studies on additional hurdles, technologies, and probiotic strains that show promising food safety benefits without compromising the quality of our food.
Finished Product Testing
Multiple samples from each batch are tested for Salmonella spp., E. coli O157:H7, and Listeria monocytogenes to ensure accuracy.
The real question isn’t whether or not a company tests their food (you should be getting yes here, if not, we would strongly advise considering other options) but rather how many samples they’re testing.
Pathogens, if present, are usually sparsely distributed. This means you can easily get a false negative if you only take a small sample from the hundreds or thousands of pounds produced in a lot.
Here's an example to visualize this. Imagine having a large bag of white rice with a few grains of brown rice mixed in. You grab one handful and find no brown rice. If you then conclude that your bag has NO brown rice, you'd be wrong. That's because you were unlikely to find the brown rice grains from just checking a small handful! Pathogen testing follows the same philosophy — you need to collect and test multiple samples to ensure you’re getting accurate results! If you’re a visual learner, check out this video illustrating the concept.
We sample every few minutes during production and usually end the day with 100+ samples to ensure that we have a high degree of confidence in our results. The video shows how we collect “meatballs” from the production line throughout the day, which are then shipped to a 3rd party lab for pathogen testing.
Facility Cleaning, Sanitation, and Good Manufacturing Practices
This refers to how you design your facility processes with the goal of maintaining a clean & safe environment for production. Unlike everything else on this list, this isn’t limited to one thing that one person does but rather this encompasses how each employee in the facility does their job, understands why things are done a certain way, and is a part of our safety culture.
It’s difficult to share exactly what we do here since the list would get very long but the theme here is that you always want to document and verify what you're doing. We have dozens of logs ranging from checking the temperatures in the facility’s freezer/fridge to noting ingredient weights in each batch. There are special weights to calibrate our scales, our cleaning solutions are titrated to verify the concentration, there's a specific order in which equipment within a room needs to be cleaned and so on.
A lot of these processes may seem puzzling from the surface but they are rooted in food safety principles. If you’re curious on what some of these practices look like, here are two videos we’ve shared: video 1, video 2.
Environmental Testing & Monitoring
Our production environment undergoes regular swabbing & testing to ensure cleanliness
Our environmental testing breaks down into 3 main categories:
ATP Testing: ATP is a molecule found in all living cells that’s responsible for energy transfer and is used as an indicator for how much bacteria is on a surface. More ATP = more bacteria. It’s hard to tell if a surface is clean enough with your naked eye so we ATP tests our surfaces after cleaning each day to make sure everything was properly soaped and scrubbed. If any surface fails, it gets recleaned and tested until it passes.
Allergen Testing: Allergen testing swabs detect the presence of proteins on surfaces and similar to ATP tests mentioned above, we test surfaces after cleaning each day to make sure there is no cross contamination of different proteins across recipes. A lot of our customers rely on our single protein recipes for their pets with allergies & sensitivities so this is something we take very seriously.
Indicator Microorganism & Pathogen Testing: Every location in our facility is mapped according to risk level and swabbed for various types of bacteria on a regular basis. Even areas that are away from production areas like hallways, walls, and ceilings are tested since microorganisms can easily be carried from one location to another. We like to test hard to clean/access locations like equipment wheels, drains, grooves in equipment and so on. This prevents bad bacteria from taking up residence in “harborage” spots.
A few examples of locations being swabbed for environmental samples
Food safety in raw pet food is often simplified to one or two dimensions around batch testing and kill steps. The reality is that all of these aspects play a critical role in the overall quality of our products. You need to start off with clean, high-quality raw materials, process it in well-maintained facility, apply effective pathogen mitigation technologies, and test robustly to make sure results are as expected.