This was an eye opener of the standards to meet AAFCO requirements.
No Proof!
Until recently, I was under a false impression – and no pet food company representative hastened to correct it! I thought if a food had a “nutrient values” claim on its label, its maker would have to submit proof that the food inside the can or bag actually contains nutrients in the required amounts. I guess I assumed the products would be tested by third party laboratories and the results would be filed with state feed control officials.
I was wrong.
The actual requirement is this: A company representative must sign and have notarized an affidavit that states, “This product meets the nutrient levels established in the AAFCO Dog Food Nutrient Profiles for (growth/reproduction, maintenance, or all life stages).” And then they have to keep a copy of that affidavit.
That’s it. Seriously.
No lab test results or analysis of the nutrients confirming that the statement is true are required.
And the affidavit doesn’t even get filed with the state! It just has to be kept “on file” in the company’s own files!
No kidding: The company has to, in effect, pinky swear that their products meet the required nutrient levels. And consumers have to just trust that the products do.
Editorial: I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s sufficient.
Why This Matters
This matters because most dogs get most (if not all) of their nutrients from commercial food. They are a captive audience, literally. They are not free to select their own foods, they can’t follow their instincts to drive them to ingredients that contain any nutrients they may be lacking. What’s more, many owners are warned by their veterinarians and other pet professionals against feeding any table scraps or “human food” to dogs. And pet food companies encourage owners to feed their products and only their products, and to use extreme caution when switching products, lest the dog explode (or something) from diarrhea (or something).
Put another way: If most dogs eat a single type of food and nothing but that food, shouldn’t their owners be able to verify that the food truly contains every nutrient their dogs need?
Raising the Bar
I’ve long believed that, for the reasons above, consumers ought to be able to ask for and readily receive a complete nutrient analysis of their dogs’ food – to make sure that the diet contains adequate (and not excessive) amounts of the nutrients that experts agree dogs need – and that was before I knew that it was possible that products that are labelled as “complete and balanced” might not be.
Last year, we surveyed the dog food companies whose products met our selection criteria and asked this question: “Do you make a complete nutrient analysis for each of your products available to consumers? If so, are the analyses available only upon request, or is this information on your website?” As it turned out, very few of the companies had nutrient analyses readily available, and some of the ones that said they had them available were not able (or perhaps not willing) to produce them.
So, this year, we sent the pet food companies whose products have been on our “approved canned dog food” list an email that said, “There will be one significant change in how we will select and present the ‘approved’ foods on our list. This year, we are asking each company to provide us with a fairly recent (within the past year) ‘typical analysis’ for each of the canned dogs foods that they offer, and we will be comparing the values with the AAFCO nutrient profiles for dogs. If we do not receive the analyses, the foods will not appear on our ‘approved foods’ list this year.”
The Results
A few companies promptly sent us what we asked for, and these companies now constitute our gold-star picks – our top-rated producers of canned foods. See the “2016 Canned Dog Food Review” for a list of these companies.
In contrast, there were other companies we didn’t hear back from. We are more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt; maybe they didn’t receive our email? Maybe our phone message got lost? If they respond in the next few months, we will update their information here.
We heard from a few companies that said they would be happy to get this information to us, but they needed more time. So, for them, too, we’re going to reserve space in the next few issues to update their information.
Quite a few companies sent us something that’s close to what we asked for; quite a few sent us nutrient analyses of their products that were generated by computer software. Different companies use different programs to generate these analyses, but they all work in a similar fashion: The programs are loaded with nutrient values for every dog food ingredient you can dream of, and then a formula for a given dog food is entered – so many pounds of this, so many ounces of that, etc. – and the software calculates the amount of nutrients that will be in the resulting food.
Literally every company has these software-driven analyses – projections, really – of their formulas, because that’s how pet food is formulated today. The concern is, how do these projections pan out when compared to actual laboratory analysis of the nutrients?
We put this question to a number of pet food experts – including formulators and pet food company owners – and the answer was, it depends on a lot of things, including:
How closely the food manufacturer hews to the recipe for the food;
What software is used to analyze the recipe;
Whether or not the software takes into account chemical reactions between ingredients that take place when the food is mixed or cooked – reactions that might cause certain nutrient values to test at different levels than the software would predict; and
Whether the pet food company routinely tests their raw ingredients in a laboratory and enters updated nutrient values for those ingredients into the software.
All of these are reasons why computer-generated analyses might return very different values than a laboratory test of the actual dog food.
So, even though these computer-generated analyses are not exactly what we asked for, we’re going to give the companies that sent them to us the benefit of the doubt, too. For now, they still appear on the list of our “approved canned dog foods” that starting on page 8. If they, too, send us actual laboratory test results for their products, we’ll upgrade their status to our gold-star list in upcoming issues.
But we’re also giving all the companies a heads-up: Only the pet food makers that provide lab analyses of their products will appear on our list of “approved dry dog foods” in the February issue.
