Pet Food Labels — Part 2 of 3

Continuing with last week’s article about pet food labels, this week will cover ingredient names, as sometimes it’s difficult to tell from the name what the ingredient actually is. Next week’s article will touch on feeding instructions and descriptive terms on the labels.

The ingredients you find listed on a pet food label have to follow regulations. They must be listed in order by weight, and must be named properly. They also have to be “officially defined animal feed ingredients, or be common or usual names of feed ingredients, be approved food additives in 21 CFR 573, or be considered GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) animal feed additives”. This means that just because it’s used in a human food doesn’t necessarily mean you can use it in a pet food. (A good example of this is hemp — it’s found in human products, but you can’t use it in animal products.)

Photo by Mel Elías on Unsplash

Ingredient: Meat

Since most pet food is made of some type of meat, let’s start with what the word “meat” on a pet food label means. If you see the word “meat” by itself, it has to be from cattle, pig, sheep, or goats. Kinda broad, eh? If it comes from a different mammal (buffalo) or non-mammal (fish), that has to be called out on the label.

Let’s assume we’re using meat from a cow. What parts of the cow could you use in your food and label as meat?

-striate skeletal muscle tissue, or muscle tissue from the esophagus, heart, tongue, diaphragm — may include skin, fat and, gristle but nothing else (so no bones)

Ingredient: Meat by-product

Then we have meat by-products from the same animals as above. What would that include?

-most of the rest of the animal that isn’t muscle, including lungs, udders, livers, kidneys, tripe, spleen, brain, bone, and blood — may *not* include hair, horns, teeth, and hooves

Photo by Meelika Marzzarella on Unsplash

Ingredient: Poultry

Lots of pet foods contain chicken or turkey, and those follow different labeling rules from cows or pigs.

If we’re using poultry, that would be defined as…

-flesh and skin, with or without bones, of chicken or turkey — frequently it’s parts that aren’t used for human consumption, like necks and backs — does *not* include feathers, head, feet and entrails

Ingredient: Poultry by-product

And then there are poultry by-products, which are…

-heads, feet, internal organs, and they’re supposed to be “free from fecal content and foreign matter except in such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice”

Rendered Ingredients

Rendered ingredients tend to be, well, controversial. Rendering is when you cook the animal meat to remove moisture and fat. And unfortunately, rendering seems to cover up a multitude of sins. Ever hear about pentobarbital in pet food? It’s a euthanasia drug, and it definitely should not be in something you’re feeding your dog or cat. But a quick internet search will get you some notices about a rather large pet food company who had a rather large recall due to the presence of pentobarbital in their food, and it’s assumed it got there through the use of rendered euthanized animals. Yikes.

How do you know if an ingredient is rendered? Look for the word “meal” after it. Ingredients like “poultry meal”, “meat meal”, and “animal byproduct meal” are all rendered. The word “meal” signals that not only have these ingredients been cooked, they’ve also been ground to pieces that are uniform in size.

(At Balanced Blends we do not use any meals. We are also completely transparent with our ingredients statement and list every ingredient including which animals parts we are using in that lot.)

These are some of the most common ingredient names you’ll stumble across when you start reading pet food labels, and hopefully this article helped demystify them! Next week I’ll touch on feeding instructions as well as descriptive terms, which will round out this short series of articles on pet food labels.