How to read a dog food label
by Ben, co-founder
Dog food bags are sold by the front and defined by the back. The front is art direction; the back is regulated. Learn to read the back and you can see through most of the industry in about five minutes. Here's the whole skill.
Rule one: it's a list by weight
Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight at the point of mixing. First ingredient = biggest share. That sounds simple, and manufacturers have two well-worn ways around it.
The water trick
"Fresh chicken" is roughly two-thirds water. It sits proudly at the top, then shrinks to a fraction once cooked. A food "led by fresh chicken" can still be mostly cereal.
The splitting trick
One cereal becomes three entries - maize, maize flour, maize gluten - each small enough to sit low, while together they'd top the list.
The counter-move is just to add the related entries back together in your head, and to give more weight to dried ingredients with named percentages.
"Meat and animal derivatives"
This phrase is a legal category, not a description. It covers by-products of any warm-blooded land animal, in any proportion, and it lets the recipe change with commodity prices without the label changing. That flexibility is the point. It's also why a dog with a suspected chicken allergy can react to a "beef" food - the derivatives can lawfully contain poultry.
You don't need to believe derivatives are evil - they're regulated and safe. You just can't do allergy detective work with a label that won't tell you what's in the bag.
The analytical constituents, translated
| On the label | What it actually tells you |
|---|---|
| Crude protein % | Total protein from all sources - it doesn't say which animal, or how digestible |
| Crude fat (oils and fats) % | Energy density - working dogs need more, sofa dogs need less |
| Crude fibre % | Roughage - relevant to poo quality |
| Crude ash % | Not cigarette ash - it's the mineral content left if you burned the food in a lab. Normal is 5-8% |
| Moisture | Only declared over 14% - why wet food numbers look so different from dry |
Words that mean nothing, words that mean everything
"Natural", "premium", "holistic", "wholesome", "vet recommended" - none of these have a legal definition on UK pet food. They're set dressing. Two boring words on the back carry all the legal weight:
- "Complete" - legally means the food contains everything a dog needs and can be the entire diet. This word is regulated and tested against FEDIAF nutrient standards.
- "Complementary" - legally means it isn't the whole diet. Treats, toppers and mixers live here. A complementary food fed as the main meal will leave gaps.
The five-minute checklist
- Is the main protein named, with a percentage? "Dried insect (27%)" tells you something; "meat and animal derivatives" declines to.
- Add the split ingredients back together. Where does the cereal really sit?
- Check "complete" vs "complementary" matches how you'll actually feed it.
- Look at the feeding guide against your dog's weight and do the cost-per-day maths - foods differ less than their bag prices suggest.
- If the maker can't or won't say exactly what's in the food when you ask, that's your answer.
Our label, held to the same rules
Fair's fair - here's ours through the same lens. Our dry food's list starts: dried insect (27%), potato (26%), sweet potato (24%), ground peas (10%). Dried, named, percentaged - no water trick, no derivatives, one animal protein in the whole recipe. That last part isn't virtue, it's function: a single named protein is what makes a food usable for allergy detective work. Read any bag in the shop the same way and you'll see the difference inside ten seconds.
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