Legal Loopholes in Dog Food Ingredients

When it comes to reading ingredients, whether it be on our food, or our dog’s food, it can be overwhelming and confusing. To get a better understanding of what’s in the food and the quality of the food, there are a few areas we can look for. These being the language loopholes, ingredient splitting, and overall ingredient content. 

Ingredient Splitting 

This loophole will commonly be spotted in the ingredient list. Ingredients list are ordered by the abundance of each content, but legally those weights could be determined before processing and cooking. Ingredient splitting is when manufacturers manipulate ingredients so that they can separate the weight and move the ingredients lower on the panel. An example of this could be splitting peas into pea flour, and pea protein so they appear lower on the list than if they were just listed as peas. This is intentionally done so higher quality ingredients will be first, grabbing the consumers attention. 

Language Loopholes 

Products that are named “beef,” “chicken,” “turkey,” ect. must contain at least 70% of that meat in their product. However if the meat is paired with another term like “dish” or “entree” there only needs to be 10% actual beef in the contents. If the label claims to be “with beef” or “beef flavor” that requires 3% or less to be beef.  

Here are the rules and their sneaky definitions: 

95% Rule: Named Ingredients “Chicken for Dogs/Salmon Dog Food” must include at least 95% of that meat. Also must be at least 70% of the total product when counting the added water.  

25% Rule: Dinner, Entre, Platter → Named product is at least 25% but less than 95%. Counting the added water, the ingredients still must comprise 10% of the product.

“With” Rule: Dog dinner with beef → only 3% of the product needs to contain beef. 

Flavor Rule: a specific percentage of real meat not required, but must contain enough to be detected.

Be wary of another loophole rule when it comes to product names that contain the word “with” or “flavored” or “dinner, entre, platter”. If a food is labeled as a “dinner, entre, platter” there only needs to be 10% actual meat in the contents. If the name consists of “with or flavored” there only needs to be 3% or less meat in the contents.

Ingredient and Formulation Variation

When we talk about ingredient and formula variation we look at the type of ingredients being used and whether or not they are synthetic or derived from natural sources. Synthetic materials, chemical isolates, are less bioavailable than whole foods sources making them less likely to be absorbed and utilized by the body. Natural sources are usually only seen in whole food diets such as raw or freeze dried. However, kibbles and canned food typically contain a range of synthetic products that can negatively affect our dogs’ health.