AAFCO is looking to change the names of many of their worst ingredients. This is not being done to improve the ingredients, rather, it is being done because consumers have been become too educated for the industry. Industry continues to want to use trash from the human food industry, bio-diesel industry, rendering industry, oleo-chemical industry and pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile, consumers keep pushing back and saying they don’t want those products in their pets or agriculture food animal feeds. Consumers often won’t even purchase products that contain these ingredients.
One would think AAFCO might think, “maybe we should stop allowing these things, since consumers are so adamantly against them.” Rather, AAFCO has decided to create a committee to eliminate issues with consumer perception and over-education instead of eliminating trash from the industry. Here is a list of current ingredient titles, some of which could end up on the Villain Ingredients panel and get some new, shiny, pretty names in the next couple years:
- By-products (this can be any form of by-product including those under other definitions such as “Unborn Calf Carcasses, Glandular Meal and Extracted Glandular Meal, Animal Digest, Leather Hydrolysate, Meat & Bone Meal Tankage, Hydrolyzed Hair, Poultry Hatchery By-Product, Hydrolyzed Poultry Feathers, Sludge and more)
- Animal Waste
- Animal Digest
- Brewer’s Rice
- Cannery Waste (which can also be labeled as Fish Oil… but that’s another post)
- Carageenan
- Corn Gluten Meal and other Corn products (also labeled simply as “corn” when mixed with other corn by-products)
- Leather Hydrolysate
- Hydrolyzed Hair
- Peanut Hulls
- Meat & Bone Meal
- Rice Hulls
- Sludge
- Recovered Retail Pet Food
- Raw Leather Residue
- Refuse
- Restaurant Food Waste
- Salvage Pet Food
- Soybean Hulls
- Toasted Corn Flakes (also labeled very simply as “Corn” when mixed with other corn by-products)
- Wheat Gluten
- … and many more
We’ll see what happens here, and FRFA will be sure to keep you updated. However, it’s important for you to keep an eye out for any company that is making claims like, “NEW AND IMPROVED… NO MORE BY-PRODUCTS”…. that’s not going to mean that they don’t use by-products anymore. Tricky, tricky… it may actually mean they no longer use anything labeled as by-products… because the labeling requirements changed. Nothing will have changed in their sourcing or company ethics, only their packaging for no other reason than to make consumers falsely think they’re buying better products.
Thanks for reading.
Food Regulation Facts 