Many of us bring a healthy dose of skepticism to the incessant marketing these days, but will be surprised at what is allowed in pet food marketing. As a vet, I was appalled to learn how little I could trust anything I found in the pet food aisles; it led me to start Sundays. 

I want to peel back the pet food industry’s glossy exterior, and share some of the most important and common ways I’ve learned products can misrepresent themselves with packaging and language. 

The 5 biggest label tricks in pet food 

1. First ingredient manipulation

Companies know shoppers are searching for products with meat as the main ingredient, which is indicated by the ingredient list. But meat is an expensive ingredient compared to carbohydrate sources, vegetables, legumes, and fillers — so many kibble companies have figured out they can skimp on meat, but still make it appear as the primary ingredient on the label, with a technique called “ingredient splitting.”

Pet food companies are required to list ingredients in descending order by weight. Ingredient splitting is a permitted tactic in food labeling, where an ingredient is broken down into its smaller composite parts and then each listed separately.

For example, a product that contains only 10% meat can legally list meat as the first ingredient by splitting non-meat ingredients (like grains and peas) into composite parts and listing those separately. 

i.e. Beef (10%), Beef meal (10%), Barley (10%), Brown rice (10%), Pea protein (8%), Rice protein (8%), Oat groats (8%), Peas (8%), Chicken fat (7%), Fish meal (5%), Pea fiber (4%), Vitamins, Minerals, and Additives (12%)

This is one of the easiest, least expensive, and most common ways to mislead dog owners about the makeup of the products they’re buying. 

2. “Made with” = 3% of final product

Another way manufacturers can use language to mislead shoppers is the use of eye-catching claims about the ingredients used in the recipes. What dog parent wouldn’t want their food to be “made with real chicken”?  

But, to claim to be “made with” an ingredient (i.e. “made with real chicken”) a product’s total volume only needs to contain 3% of an ingredient. In other words, a product “made with real chicken” can write those words on the bag as largely and repetitively as they like, but the reality is they’re only promising a tiny fraction of the product is chicken. 

3. Images do not have to represent ingredients actually used 

When walking down the dog food aisle you have to wonder — are those gorgeous beef steaks and pristine vegetables on the front of the bags actually what’s in the food? 

In short, almost certainly not. The standards for ingredients in pet food are what’s known as “feed-grade”, much lower than what is required in human food, and the processes they’re subjected to are not represented on the bags. 

Kibble is typically made by exposing its ingredients to extreme temperatures and pressure, cooking them down into one consistent slurry, then forming kibble pellets. To make them palatable to dogs and balanced nutritionally, they are then coated with a mixture of fats and nutrients and other palatants (flavor enhancers) as one of the final steps. 

High quality, fresh meats and vegetables like those commonly depicted on packaging wouldn’t need all this processing to be safe and palatable. And with the final product typically costing just cents per serving, the math confirms that the chance of premium-cost, photogenic ingredients being used to make low-cost pellets is practically zero. 

4. Meat meal

A common ingredient that is often found on a pet food label is “meat meal”, which sounds harmless. Maybe even good, since a meal of meat is exactly what you want to feed your dog! In reality, this is a telltale sign of a low quality food. 

Meat meal is created by a process called “rendering”. It begins by taking a large quantity of meat and cooking it at extreme temperatures to remove all the water, resulting in a concentrated, powdered, inexpensive form of protein. Since the rendering process is designed to kill pathogens as much as create a convenient form of protein, low quality ingredients such as 4D meats (sourced from animals that are “dead, diseased, dying, or disabled) are permitted to be used. 

If meat meal is a key ingredient in a pet food, it’s a safe bet that it’s not packed with the highest quality nutrition. 

5. Unregulated, undefined, and ill-defined terms 

Words like “Premium,” “Holistic,” and “Gourmet” all sound wonderful, but in the pet food industry, these terms have no legal definition or standard and are just trendy marketing terms with little legal weight. 

Even in the case of the word “Natural”, which sounds simple, self-explanatory, and is defined by AAFCO, it’s hard to understand what the term actually promises. 

AAFCO’s definition of a “Natural” product includes those that are “subject to physical processing, heat processing, rendering, purification, extraction, hydrolysis, enzymolysis or fermentation, but not having been produced by or subject to a chemically synthetic process and not containing any additives or processing aids that are chemically synthetic except in amounts as might occur in good manufacturing practices.”

Put another way, these common buzzwords are used to appeal to consumers, while promising them almost nothing. 

How Sundays made the cleanest label in pet food

We founded Sundays to put dogs’ health over company profits, and we take pride in our ingredients and the standards we hold ourselves to. If it sounds like it comes from a lab, it’s not in our food! 

1. Human-grade standards

We put dog health, nutrition, and owner trust first, and voluntarily hold ourselves to the higher standards set by the human food industry, known as “human-grade”. All of our kitchen facilities are held to strictly-enforced safety and hygiene standards, and our ingredients too. The result is a tangibly higher quality food, so healthy and clean that a human can eat it! 

2. Real meat and real nutrition

No hacks, gimmicks, or suspicious byproducts — at least 80% of each of our recipes is made up of whole, recognizable, high-quality protein. We pack in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains for vitamins, minerals, and digestive aids. The result is not only a healthy one, but a delicious one too. 

3. No artificial anything

We carry our real food philosophy through the entire product. The only preservative we use, mixed tocopherols, is derived from vegetables, and also contributes a natural source of vitamin E. Most other brands (dry food, wet food, even frozen and raw options) use synthetic nutrient mixes to balance their recipes, but all of Sundays’ nutrition is derived directly from the whole ingredients we use. There’s nothing artificial about our recipes, just real food, that’s really healthy for dogs (and really easy for owners!) 

Try Sundays today and discover pet food you can trust

We have several healthy, high-quality recipes, with ingredient lists that anybody could read! Just tell us a little about your dog, and we’ll help you get started feeding the healthiest, easiest pet food on the planet. And if you ever have any questions about our ingredients, facilities, or manufacturing standards, our customer service team is here to answer them all!