Is it Meat or Meat Analogues?

Does your pet’s food include fabricated meat analogue?

A recent pet food industry trade publication provided a ‘how to’ post of “Tricks to make extruded pet food, treats look homemade“. Industry ‘tricks’ to mislead pet owners.

“The extrusion process tends to produce uniform kibble and treats that clearly were made in an industrial process. To address this, extruder operators can manipulate their machines to make mass produced pet foods look like they came out of a small batch oven.“

The biggest manipulation is extruded meat chunks in pet food.

“To create meat analogues, he uses a different technique. ‘If you want it to look like just a chunk of meat that you pulled off of a cooked chicken breast, we’ve done those type of products with some adjustments at the die,’ he said.”

It’s one thing to manipulate a dog or cat treat to give it an appearance of being homemade. It is deceiving pet owners, but perhaps because it is deception we are familiar with in human food, it doesn’t seem as concerning.

It’s a completely different level of deception to manipulate feed grade vegetable proteins and feed grade powdered meat into an extruded ‘chunk of meat’ with the appearance ‘that you pulled it off a cooked chicken breast’ with NO disclosure to the pet owner.

Are any of these pet foods made with fabricated/analogue meat?

We don’t know. Because pet food regulatory authorities do not require manufacturers to disclose to pet owners if meat chunks are actual meat or analogue meat.

The industry can brag about their pet food ‘tricks’, but they stop short of disclosing to pet owners the true content of their pet foods.

In 2015 we asked FDA and AAFCO to require pet food manufacturers to disclose the use of fabricated meats in pet food. Needless to say, no one in regulatory listened.

If you provide your pet with a canned food, ask the manufacturer if the meat is an analogue (or extruded) meat.

Pet owners can also give FDA and AAFCO their opinion on this issue. Email the FDA at: AskCVM@fda.hhs.gov (ask them for a response). Email AAFCO at: aafco@aafco.org (also ask for a response).

Wishing you and your pet(s) the best,

Susan Thixton
Pet Food Safety Advocate
Author Buyer Beware, Co-Author Dinner PAWsible
TruthaboutPetFood.com
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