If you’ve recently wandered the pet food aisles at your local pet specialty retailer, you’ve likely seen some or all of these trendy, yet misleading, marketing claims processed pet food companies use.
Such as:
- Freeze dried raw
- Dehydrated raw
- Low temperature dehydrated
- Air dried
- Raw coated
- Raw infused
- With the benefits of raw
and many others…
There are products like these hitting the pet food shelves every day, because kibble companies are beginning to acknowledge that fresh food brings benefits that processed foods are unable to. However, rather than producing raw food, they want to convince the customer that their products are almost raw, or as good as raw, a very misleading marketing tactic that has customers believing they are paying for a product that is not what it claims to be.
The definition of raw is simple; in a natural state, without having been through any chemical or industrial process. Seems like for some companies, it isn’t as simple as that. Dehydration, infusion, and coating are all industrial processes. Before the product undergoes any of these processes, it would be in a “raw” state, so calling freeze dried pet food “raw” is a euphemism – the product was most likely raw before being dehydrated, but the end product is no longer raw. You can’t get all the benefits of an unprocessed raw food, like high digestibility and moisture content, when the food has been cooked or had most of the moisture removed through freeze drying or dehydration. It is simply not raw anymore.
How can we identify these misleading marketing claims? Here are some tips:
- A raw product is not shelf stable, and never will be. To be shelf stable, the once raw material has undergone a chemical or industrial process. That process can be minimal, like freeze drying (moisture removed without the use of heat), but nonetheless, it is not raw.
- Extra processing means higher cost. You will be paying more for extra processing of the raw materials, in order to make it shelf stable. When it says “infused” or “coated”, it simply means that a coating has been added to the food itself, before or after the extrusion process, in addition to the processed ingredients – like meat flour, mixed in before the extrusion. But the end product, again, is very far from raw – containing little to no moisture, having been cooked or extruded, and is now shelf stable.
- Product claiming that it has both the benefits of raw and kibble are probably the most misleading – kibble that has not been through a high heat process, is still extruded. Extrusion, by definition, is the process of forcing soft mixed ingredients, sometimes raw, through an opening in a perforated plate or die designed to produce the required shape, using heat and high pressure. The extruded food is then cut to a specific size by blades. So most pet food, even the dehydrated, baked or freeze dried ones, are by definition extruded, simply to create their shape and texture (crispy, crunchy and air puffed). And to keep that form and texture, most still need to contain a significant quantity of starch (complex sugar) – often making up more than 30% of the food. The only difference is that some companies will use more or less heat to create the little kibble nuggets. Less heat means less nutrient loss, which is great, but still not raw.
To keep things simple, anything that you find on a pet store shelf, whether food or treats, is never raw.
Located near the actual raw food options in the freezer, you might also find “gently cooked” products, though also not raw, as crazy as it sounds, these products might actually be closer to raw than most of those claiming to be raw products found on the shelf. We know that cooking temperatures affect nutrient retention and because most of these products are cooked at lower temperatures, like the food we eat, these types of food items would require less supplementation to remain balanced.
It’s important not to allow processed pet food companies to charm us with their claims. In a way, it shows their understanding and acknowledgement of the benefits of raw for our pets, but ultimately it is stealing the reputation of a word to intentionally mislead a customer into buying their processed food.