Our goal is enhanced transparency and accountability in the information pet food brands give you — so you can feel confident in the decisions you make for your pet.
Traditionally, purchase decisions came down to two things: budget and convenience. In the past decade, two more criteria have entered the picture — and reshaped the entire category.
Highly processed, lower-cost options that fit the family budget.
Shelf-stable, easy to scoop or open, simple to store.
Natural, higher-quality, more bio-available nutrition made to stricter human-food standards.
Pets as true family members — real meals like Italian Beef Pasta Dinner, with a wide variety of proteins, vegetables, and fruits.
Every pet owner weighs these four criteria in their own way. There is no single right answer — but there should be honest information behind every option.
The FPFA defines "Fresh" as any pet food that requires refrigeration or freezing — predominantly gently-cooked foods that resemble what we feed our families, and raw foods. Unlike kibble, canned, dehydrated, or freeze-dried products, fresh foods prioritize quality, digestibility, and freshness, requiring cold-chain logistics and culinary-level food-safety practices.
For decades, pet food in Canada and the US was effectively unregulated: little oversight of ingredient claims, quality, safety, or whether what the label said was actually in the bag.
Unverified — and poisonous — ingredients enter products from an industry leader. By some estimates, thousands of pets are killed. The event exposes how little verification stood behind pet food.
The Association of American Feed Control Officials — guiding US feed regulators for more than 110 years — introduces a comprehensive program for transparent, consumer-friendly labeling, enforced state by state. It applies only to brands selling in the US.
A rigorous definition: every ingredient and the finished product must be stored, handled, processed, and transported in compliance with applicable federal human food law. A very high bar most companies are unwilling to meet.
The CFIA administers limited labeling rules and focuses its pet food role on export compliance. There is effectively no regulation of quality, safety, or truthfulness for pet food made and sold within Canada — anyone can make pet food in a garage and sell it online.
An alliance of fresh pet food producers offering the accountability and transparency Canadian regulation doesn't — including extending AAFCO Human Grade compliance into Canada.
Human Grade was traditionally a meaningless marketing term. With no regulatory definition, its use confused consumers and created a significant gap between true product quality and what buyers thought they were getting.
AAFCO's 2022 standards changed that in the US. But AAFCO has no jurisdiction in Canada, and the CFIA has been unwilling to adopt its standards — so brands selling in Canada can still claim "human grade" while meeting none of the expected quality and safety standards. That's potentially unsafe, deeply deceptive, and unfair to the brands that invest heavily in genuinely meeting the bar while competitors make the same claim for free.
FPFA Certified Human Grade is the only standard in Canada modeled on AAFCO's definition — applying the full AAFCO Human Grade Standards across the equivalent federal human food laws in Canada. To date, two Canadian pet food brands have achieved it, with more in active certification discussions.
One more thing worth understanding: human grade is a food safety and quality-of-production standard — a major step up from feed grade. It tells you the food was made from human-edible ingredients, in a licensed human food facility, under human food law. What it doesn't tell you is the quality tier of those ingredients. Fast food is human grade; so is a chef-prepared meal. Two certified human grade pet foods can differ vastly in ingredient quality — which is a big part of why their prices differ too.
That's exactly why the FPFA publishes more than a mark: scored profiles and verified attributes let you see what a brand invested in, not just that it cleared the bar.
See which brands are FPFA Certified Human Grade, which are FPFA Approved, and which have genuinely substantiated Human Grade under AAFCO in the U.S. — all in one list.
The pet food industry has broadly adopted AAFCO's "Complete and Balanced" minimum nutritional standards — it's what most veterinarians learn. But no organization in Canada verifies compliance. A product sold in Canada can say both Human Grade and Complete and Balanced, and neither claim is checked by anyone.
This matters most for pets with medical conditions. Many dogs develop internal inflammation conveyed as pancreatitis and need specialized low-fat diets — yet there is no oversight ensuring the fat level printed on a label is the fat level in the product.
Portion guidance has the same problem. We've found numerous national brands whose feeding instructions and online calculators use artificially low caloric-needs calculations — understating how much food you'll need, and therefore the daily cost. When a pet struggles on the recommended portion, the response is always that "every pet is different." We believe this is highly deceptive.
There are currently no food-safety standards for pet food made and sold within the same Canadian province, especially direct-to-consumer. This blind spot exists even for human food: an online meal-box company preparing food in Ontario and shipping only to Ontario homes faces no food-safety inspection. Now imagine that with an unregulated product like pet food.
Even certifications can mislead. HACCP is a crucial food-safety program — but there's the rigorous human-food HACCP, and a significantly reduced version for "pet feed." Canadian labeling law doesn't require brands to say which one they mean, so "made in a HACCP facility" can describe an unfinished garage meeting pet-feed standards.
Not every brand needs to reach Certified Human Grade — very few do, and that's fine. But the brands investing in genuinely different quality and safety deserve to be clearly distinguished from those misleading consumers into thinking a feed-grade product made in a garage is equivalent to one made in a federally licensed human food facility.
News on certification, new verified brands, and the push to raise pet-food standards across North America.