The choices can be overwhelming whether you’re staring into a freezer at your local pet store or staring at a list of options online. We started our journey with the exact same question that you have right now: how do we figure out the right food to feed?

We’ve been manufacturing pet food for a few years now and have come to understand the ins & outs of how companies formulate, source, make decisions on the tradeoff between quality & cost, and what really makes one brand of food different from another. If we were to look for another brand to feed, these would be the questions we ask.

Our goal with this isn’t to tell you the single best food to feed but rather to share our learnings and empower you to make the best decision for your pets

All pet food sold in the US is required to meet nutritional requirements set out by AAFCO in order to be labeled as complete and balanced. The label should either state that the food is balanced to AAFCO or that it is meant for intermittent or supplemental feeding. Unless your pet has a special dietary requirement and you plan to consult with experts & supplement yourself, you should look for a Complete & Balanced diet. 

Most people would be surprised to learn that there is no verification process a company legally has to go through in order to label their food Complete & Balanced. No auditors from the state or FDA will ask to see your nutrient testing results or test your food before it goes to market. They can of course test your food afterwards but their resources are limited so the reality is that regulatory testing for nutrients rarely happens, especially for smaller brands. Their main focus is food safety (pathogens, toxins), so nutritional adequacy takes a back seat.

All that to say, any manufacturer can label their food as balanced without it actually being so. Some just don’t know what the term entails and others want to avoid the additional expenses of nutrient testing. 

Proper formulation involves using software that calculates the nutritional profile of your recipes AND regularly testing your ingredients. However, the latter is something that many companies don’t do enough of because of the expense. You’ll want to look for a company that conducts regular nutrient testing of vitamins & minerals and not just macronutrients like fat, protein, and carbohydrates.

To balance costs against the robustness of our nutrient testing, we have a targeted testing program (we’re not running full AAFCO panels all the time since those are several thousand dollars per test). For example, raw ingredients will be tested more frequently than full recipes since we can use that data across recipes that share those ingredients. And when we test, we’re selective about the nutrients we examine. Kelp is the main source of iodine for us so we’ll test it for iodine but not other minerals like calcium which we know it won’t contain in meaningful amounts. We run full AAFCO panels several times a year to essentially check our work but these targeted tests are the main driver behind our sourcing decision and recipe adjustments. 

AAFCO has 3 different sets of nutrient requirements that correspond with your pet’s life stage: Growth & Reproduction, Adult Maintenance, and All Life Stages.

Many foods are formulated for All Life Stages since you have one recipe that can be fed to both puppies & adult dogs or kittens and adult cats.

For optimum nutrition, we have a separate puppy recipe formulated for Growth & Reproduction and our other dog recipes are formulated for Adult Maintenance so that the nutrient profiles of each line can be more tailored.

Our cat recipes are made for All Life Stages since the nutrient requirements for kittens vs. adult cats doesn’t differ as much as puppies vs. adult dogs. In addition, cats have a harder time transitioning foods so if we wanted someone to be able to start their kitten on raw and be able to stick with that food into adulthood! 

Food safety in raw is fundamentally a scientifically challenging problem since you want to eliminate harmful bacteria without compromising the raw nature of the food. Although food safety isn’t just about the kill step, it’s a simple question that can give you good insight into the manufacturer.

What you want to see is that the company is using some method here and most importantly, that they have validated its effectiveness. A validation study is where you inoculate your product sample with bacteria, apply your intervention, and check that it successfully eliminates the pathogens. Here are some red flag responses:

• They rely on clean sourcing or USDA inspection: this is a myth since pathogens are allowed and expected in raw human-grade meat, even when it's grass-fed, organic, pasture-raised etc.

• They state that pets are able to handle bacterial contamination: while animals may be able to handle higher loads, they are not immune.In addition, FDA has a zero tolerance policy for pathogens in pet food.

• They haven’t conducted any validation studies: many food safety technologies in raw are highly dependent on the product matrix and application parameters and are truly not one size fits all. FDA inspectors will ask for your validation study data to prove your interventions work.

If you want to learn more, we’ve evaluated several of the most common technologies and here’s a more detailed overview of our food safety approach 

The answer here should always be yes but the real question is if they’re sampling enough to avoid false negatives. Pathogens are sparsely distributed in the food so if you’re only taking a small number of samples per batch, odds are you’ll receive negative results based on chance alone .

We sample every few minutes throughout production so that we can have a high statistical confidence in our test results.

When it comes to sourcing standards, the “right” answer is based on your personal & ethical preferences. We always encourage you to ask a company what their sourcing standards are so you can see if there’s a “personality” fit. So with that being said, here’s a brief overview of our standards and why, to help you get to know us a bit better: 

Human grade is a legally defined term and means that the product is made under the same standards and regulations as food intended for human consumption. Essentially, all of our suppliers sell ingredients for the human food supply! While feed grade ingredients aren’t all bad, for us, sourcing human grade ingredients provides an extra layer of quality that we want for our pets and yours. 

USDA inspected specifically applies to meat and all meat for human consumption in the US is USDA inspected (or equivalent if from overseas). USDA inspected means during harvesting & packaging, a USDA inspector was always on site to make sure everything was processed under proper sanitary conditions (ex: clean equipment, proper refrigeration etc). Again, an extra layer of quality we want to have in our recipes. 

Overuse of antibiotics & hormones leads to both animal and human welfare concerns. Our farms will only use antibiotics when medically necessary and under veterinary supervision. By not relying on chemicals, our farmers focus on providing high quality food and a clean environment to raise healthy animals. 

This isn’t just a buzzword for us. All of our farms have their animal welfare programs certified through third-party audits like G.A.P. or the American Humane Program. These programs include standards on the minimum sq ft per animal, the number of enrichment fixtures (perches, hay bales etc) to encourage natural behavioral expression, and how the livestock needs to be transported & slaughtered to minimize stress. 

All of our fruit & vegetable ingredients are organic and our seafood ingredients are sustainably wild-caught. We think the additional cost & quality here is worth it. 

If you're not sure where to start, use our feeding calculator for personalized feeding recommendations and recipe suggestions.