Blog

Stay away from any pet food that uses ingredient splitting. Ingredient splitting is the deceptive practice of subdividing a more abundant, yet inferior quality ingredient into smaller portions.

This dubious tactic can be used to artificially raise a meat item to a higher position on an ingredients list, and lower an inferior one. Ingredients are listed in order of which one weighs the most.

Being able to divide a dominant ingredient into smaller portions permits any pet food company to trick you into believing there’s more meat in a product than there actually is.

This trick can be done with almost any ingredient in a bag of pet food! For instance, let’s take a random bag of pet food labeled Pork and Peas. The pea ingredient has been broken down into 3 different categories: peas, pea flour and pea protein. By breaking them down into different categories, the weight of the peas can be divided into three, leaving the meat ingredient on top of the list.

The peas outnumber the meat by almost a 3:1 ratio. Rather than the bag being called peas and pork, it can now be labeled pork and peas because of this sneaky trick!

Some other examples to look for when ingredient splitting can occur:

Corn: Corn gluten meal, corn flour, and whole ground corn
Rice: whole rice, white rice, rice flour and rice bran
Potatoes: dried potatoes, potato starch, potato protein, and potato flour

Stay away from any foods that practice ingredient splitting as they are not healthy and are raising the protein content of the food from a non beneficial nutritional standpoint for your pets. Ingredient splitting raises the protein content by lowering the nutritional content. That’s why companies who practice ingredient splitting sell their food so cheaply.