Better Decision Making for Pet Parents

There has been a constant evolution in pet food, culminating in the highest quality and safest real food options found in the Fresh category. Here is a representation of how pet food has evolved over time, and the options that are available to every pet owner to meet their own unique set of pet food purchase decision making criteria.

Traditionally pet food purchase decisions were made given two primary criteria - Budget and Convenience. This is why most pet food options to the left side of the evolution spectrum revolve around highly processed, lower cost items that are very convenient for pet owners (shelf stable and ease of scooping kibble or opening a can). In the past decade or so, there has been a growing trend where we have seen the introduction of two additional criteria - Health and Humanization.

Health - more pet owners want to make food decisions to best support the health and longevity of their family pet, and are willing to pay for enhanced food options that are more natural, of higher quality, where ingredient nutrients are more bio-available, and are safer through the adoption of more stringent human food production standards.

Humanization - more pet owners treat their pets like true members of their family, and are seeking products and services that treat their pets more like humans. For the most part we see this with pet brands moving away from the generic “chicken, beef and fish” recipes to more elaborate humanized meal offerings like Italian Beef Pasta Dinner and Beef&Broccoli. This is also starting to dramatically change the spectrum of nutrient sources available to pets, where some pets are eating a wide variety of different proteins, vegetables, and fruits on a weekly basis. This also is starting to impact traditional concepts like “Complete and Balanced” where every pet food had to have all of the nutrients possible as if that was the only food a pet would be served for their life.

Every pet owner has their own unique way of weighing these four criteria in choosing the best food for their pet, depending on their own budget and other circumstances. The goal of the FPFA is to bring enhanced transparency and accountability in the information provided to pet owners by pet food brands so you can feel confident in the decisions you make for your pet.

What is Fresh Pet Food?

The FPFA defines “Fresh” pet food as any product that requires refrigeration or freezing, which predominantly includes gently-cooked foods that resemble what we feed our families, and raw foods. Unlike kibble, canned food, dehydrated or freeze-dried, these products prioritize quality, digestibility, and freshness — requiring cold chain logistics and culinary-level food safety practices.

Making it Easier for Consumers to know what they are actually Buying

Pet food was effectively unregulated in Canada and the US for decades, with little to no oversight over ingredient claims and quality, safety or verification that what a consumer thought they were purchasing from the product label was actually the product inside the bag! This started to change after a horrific event in 2007 where unverified (and poisonous) ingredients were included in pet food products by an industry leader that contributed to pet deaths that in some estimates reached the hundreds of thousands of pets killed. In 2015 the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), which is an independent organization that has been guiding US state, federal and international feed regulators with ingredient definitions, label standards and laboratory standards for more than 110 years, introduced the Pet Food Label Modernization program. The goal of this program has been to provide consumers and regulators with labeling information that is transparent, easy to understand, and in a format more familiar to consumers. This labelling program only applies to pet food brands selling in the US, and is a very comprehensive set of requirements that are enforced in each state. In Canada there are some very limited requirements for pet food labelling under the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act and administered by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), but effectively no regulation around quality, safety or verification that what is on the label is actually in the product.

For this reason, many global brands contract their pet food manufacturing to companies in Canada because there is effectively no regulatory oversight or minimum standards - so it’s cheaper and easier to make pet food in Canada. As AAFCO continues to improve standards and compliance for pet food along with the FDA and USGA in the US, the CFIA has an “animal feed” division that almost exclusively manages compliance for export standards for finished pet food products leaving Canada. Anyone in Canada can make pet food in their garage, with no oversight or verification that it is safe both for pets and their human family members, and sell it online. Unfortunately this situation is very common across Canada, with impressive websites for products with no oversight or accountability. As kibble, canned and freeze dried products are more difficult to replicate in one’s garage or apartment, this was not as big of a problem across Canada until fresh pet food became the market growth leader. This is one of the fundamental reasons why we started the FPFA - to raise the bar for pet food accountability in Canada, and so consumers can start to verify the quality and safety of the products they are purchasing online and having delivered to their homes.

Human Grade Claims

Human Grade was traditionally a meaningless marketing term used across the pet food industry. Given that there was no regulatory definition or standards to use this term, its use confused consumers and created a significant gap between underlying true product quality and what consumers thought they were buying. This continued in the pet food industry until the market started shifting to higher quality fresh pet foods and an enhanced consumer demand for transparency and accountability in understanding the true quality of the products they were buying. In late 2022, the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) released a comprehensive set of Standards for claiming that a pet food product is “Human Grade”. As seen in the linked Standards document, the term Human Grade specifies that every ingredient and the resulting product must be stored, handled, processed, and transported in a manner that is consistent and compliant with applicable federal human food law as required by ingredient, process and/or facility type. This has become the new standard and is a very high bar that many pet food companies are unwilling to meet.

Similar to Canada’s lack of sufficient regulation for pet food labels, the CFIA has been unwilling to adopt the AAFCO human grade standards for the Canadian market. This results in a situation where Canadian pet food brands are still using claims of “human grade” while not meeting any of the consumer-expected quality and safety standards. It not only has the potential to be unsafe for pets and consumers, but it is also incredibly deceptive where Canadian consumers aren’t actually feeding the product they think they are buying. Finally, it is unfair to those pet food brands that are willing to invest heavily in achieving these higher standards, when their competitors can simply claim that they are making a similar product without any regulation or compliance requirement.

FPFA Certified Human Grade for Canada (AAFCO Equivalency)

One of the mandates of the FPFA is to be the AAFCO equivalent for Canada as it pertains to adhering to a policy regulating the term “human grade” for pet food across Canada. We have established the “FPFA Certified Human Grade” certification program which fully applies the AAFCO Human Grade Standards across the equivalent federal human food laws in Canada. Instead of participating as the FDA and USDA do with AAFCO in the US, the CFIA will maintain its current pet food role in administering animal feed export compliance. Our goal is for our growing number of FPFA brands and Canadian pet owner demands for enhanced product accountability and transparency to drive the future involvement of the CFIA to better regulate pet food for consumers. This is why an alliance of fresh pet food producers have come together to offer enhanced accountability and transparency to consumers.

As of late 2025, three Canadian pet food brands have achieved the FPFA Certified Human Grade standard in Canada. The updated list is found on the FPFA Brand page.

Nutrition Transparency

The FPFA is also committed to adopting enhanced pet food labelling requirements in Canada (AAFCO labeling requirements) so there is better accountability and transparency around verified nutritional compliance. Similar to a lack of food safety or ingredient verification regulation for pet food in Canada, the CFIA does not mandate nutritional compliance for pet foods in Canada, or even minimal nutritional standards. The broader pet food industry has adopted the “Complete and Balanced” minimum nutritional standards set by AAFCO (most vets learn about this standard), but no organization in Canada verifies it. So, similar to the term “human grade”, a consumer can be buying a product in Canada that says that it is both Human Grade and Complete and Balanced, but those are meaningless terms in the Canadian market and there is no regulatory oversight in Canada to ensure the products using those terms actually comply. This is also important when it comes to important medical conditions that require specific diet requirements. For example, many dogs develop internal inflammation that gets conveyed as “pancreatitis” and need specialized low fat diets. Yet there is no oversight to ensure that the fat level on a product’s label is indeed the fat level of the product. This can significantly impact the health of a sick family pet.

Also, there is no requirement for pet food brands to be transparent on how they calculate the “required daily calories” for a pet. We’ve found numerous national brands that both in the feeding instructions on their labels and their online feeding calculators use an artificially low caloric needs calculation that under-estimates the amount of food a purchaser will need for their pet, which ultimately reduces the perceived daily cost that consumer thinks they will need to spend on their pet’s diet. Once their pet starts to experience health issues with the recommended portion, the feedback is always that “every pet is different and your pet must need more calories”. We feel that this is highly deceptive to consumers in making a decision for their pet’s diet.

Given these situations, the FPFA provides enhanced ways for its member brands to more accountably communicate nutritional information to consumers. Every pet food brand is different, and there are different levels of desired compliance. The FPFA provides multiple categories for brands to showcase how they are trying to be better in certain areas of quality and safety.

Food Safety Transparency

We all love our pets, and all have our own unique factors for determining the decisions we make for our pets. Pet food safety is something that consumers are pushing for more transparency around. Currently there are no food safety standards for pet food made and sold in Canada, especially within the same province and if it is sold exclusively “Direct To Consumer” - ie from website to your home. This is an unfortunate blind spot of food safety in Canada, even for human food. If you buy a meal box for your family from a company online that prepares the meals in Ontario, and only ships to Ontario customers’ homes, there is no food safety inspections or oversight. How can this be? So now imagine what happens when you take an unregulated product like pet food and buy from a brand that is “online only”. This is what the FPFA and our members want to educate the public about, and to help differentiate products from brands that are investing to be safer and higher quality from those who don’t. Regularly we see new fresh pet food brands online advertising that they are human grade, or Canadian TV shows where judging “eat” the pet food that is claimed to be human grade, yet these don’t meet any of these claims, the brands don’t even try and instead are deceptive making products literally out of unrefrigerated garages.

Not every brand has to reach FPFA Human Grade quality - in fact, very few actually make that standard - and that is fine as many pet owners are not seeking to invest in feeding a certified human grade product. However, those few brands who invest in making a product that is completely different from others in terms of quality and safety should be identified and have their products clearly differentiated from those who mislead consumers to think that their feed grade product made in a garage is similar to one made in a federal licensed human food facility.

The FPFA wants to showcase those who are investing in being better. For example, in the food industry there is a crucial food safety program called HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) which conveys to customers and regulatory authorities that every effort is employed to create a total proactive food safe environment within a facility and/or complete supply chain. The problem is that there is the common human food HACCP requirements, and then there is a significantly reduced HACCP program for “pet feed”. Canadian labeling laws do not require the clarification of which standard is met, so pet food companies list that they are made in a HACCP facility yet an unfinished garage can be used for pet feed HACCP standards. It’s hard enough to understand the various acronyms for food safety certifications, and how they apply to either food or “feed” facilities. This is why the FPFA wants to showcase and help differentiate those brands who are investing in process above unregulated “feed” grade.