Brands paying a manufacturer to make their product deserve to know exactly what quality and safety stands behind it — just as consumers do.
Pet food manufacturing standards are incredibly fragmented, and the policy environment in Canada is very confusing. A new fresh pet food brand assessing a potential manufacturing partner often has no reliable way to understand the true standards behind the facility they're about to trust with their product.
The FPFA educates brands on what to ask of manufacturing partners — and better yet, maintains a list of manufacturers who have themselves gone through the FPFA Approval process, or who operate inspected human food facilities compliant with the highly stringent FPFA Certified Human Grade standard. That lets a brand truthfully communicate that they've invested in a genuinely human grade fresh pet food product.
A common deception: a manufacturer claims to use "human grade ingredients" — but the process of making and storing the food doesn't meet human grade requirements. True human grade covers every ingredient, every step of production, and the final product.
One of the FPFA's mandates is to be the AAFCO equivalent for Canada in regulating the term "human grade" for pet food. AAFCO, being US-based, relies on federal human food regulations known as the 21 CFR Part 117 standards. The FPFA has done the detailed parallel policy equivalency for Canada, leveraging the Safe Food for Canadians Act and Regulations, the Food Safety and Quality Act, and O.Reg 31/05 for human food.
Unfortunately, countless pet food brands sold only in Canada deceptively call themselves Human Grade without meeting the strict requirements — something AAFCO would not permit in the US.
Manufacturers who verify against the FPFA standard give every brand they produce for a defensible, documented claim. The complete mapping — every 21 CFR Part 117 provision matched to its Canadian parallel, plus the U.S. government's own recognition of Canadian equivalency — is published on our equivalency resource page.
Become a verified partner → See the full documentation requirements →
Manufacturers earn FPFA Approved against the same 100-point documentation scorecard as brands, and the same verified attributes — Human-Food HACCP, Cold Chain, and Traceability. Verified facilities are listed in the FPFA member directory, which is exactly where brands go looking for a manufacturing partner they can trust.
Our redaction protocol matters most here: you never submit supplier lists, formulations, or process know-how. Documents arrive with commercial details blacked out, and verification happens at the source — licence numbers checked against public registries, certificates confirmed with the accredited bodies that issued them. Only your scores and verified attributes are published. Your know-how stays yours; your standards become visible.
News on certification, new verified brands, and the push to raise pet-food standards across North America.