100% HUMAN GRADE

To ensure your pets eat the safest, healthiest and highest quality foods, we insist on 100% human grade. It’s a real standard no feed-grade food can claim.

The Honest Kitchen has a letter of No Objection from the FDA, to label our foods Human Grade. Our entire supply chain and production process have been reviewed by the FDA on two separate occasions, to earn us this distinction. Human Grade means ‘food grade’, ‘edible’, or fit for human consumption. For us, it’s a line in the sand about the quality and integrity of the finished products we send out the door.

We blend our healthy pet food in a human food facility that makes things like breakfast cereal and bakery mixes. So, we abide by the same strict standards for safety, cleanliness, record-keeping and overall quality as the place that whips up your favorite cookie dough.

PET FOOD QUALITY STANDARDS

The Honest Kitchen does more than meet the highest standard for food safety and quality — we invented it. A few other pet food brands have since followed our lead, but most continue to use inferior, feed-grade ingredients. Once you learn the difference, you’ll never go back to feed grade again.

Our Ingredients

From eggs and salmon to pumpkin and parsley, wholesome foods you recognize and can pronounce are the only ingredients we use. Ingredients are sourced from around the world and we’ve worked with many of the same suppliers since we first began in 2002. What we leave out is as important as what we put in.

Our Promise to You

A vast majority of pet food makers use stuff we never use from places we don’t trust. The Honest Kitchen is made in the USA and never contains the potentially unsafe and unhealthy ingredients found in feed-grade products.

Trustable Sources

We only source from folks we know and trust, including a few we started with back in 2002. It’s important to us to have long-standing relationships with producers we know and trust, so we can throw a brick through their window if something’s not quite right, and buy them a pint when everything’s as beautiful as they’ve promised. To meet our 100% human-grade standard, our suppliers must provide proof of food origins, screening, handling, cleaning and more.

Our true food origins:

HUMAN GRADE

The Honest Kitchen has a letter of No Objection from the FDA, to label our foods Human Grade. Our entire supply chain and production process have been reviewed by the FDA on two separate occasions, to earn us this distinction. Human Grade means ‘food grade’, ‘edible’, or fit for human consumption. For us, it’s a line in the sand about the quality and integrity of the finished products we send out the door.

We blend our healthy pet food in a human food facility that makes things like breakfast cereal and bakery mixes. So, we abide by the same strict standards for safety, cleanliness, record-keeping and overall quality as the place that whips up your favorite cookie dough.

Is all pet food human-grade?

Our recipes also meet the nutritional levels established by AAFCO (The Association of American Feed Control Officials), which is the legal way of saying, it’s just like the healthy whole food you eat, but formulated especially for pets.

Some companies use a few ‘human grade’ ingredients, but their processing may not take place in a human food facility, so their products lose their legal human grade status. Old-fashioned pet food like kibble and canned food is ‘feed grade’, which means it might include not-so-tasty by-products, chemicals, fillers and other ingredients that have been condemned as unfit for human consumption (like dying, diseased, disabled or deceased animals). We wouldn’t choose that for our human family, and we don’t think our animal friends deserve it either.

Our production plant

Our organic dog foods, cat foods, treats and supplements are made only from 100% human food grade ingredients. That means our safe cat food and dog food recipes are produced to the exact same standards as the foods you eat – in a plant that actually produces human foods like bakery mixes, right alongside our products.

In fact, our plant is registered and inspected by the FDA and meets SQF (Safe Quality Foods) level II standards for human food safety. We already exceed all of the proposed FDA guidelines, including HACCP food safety regulations and established GMP’s (Good Manufacturing Practices). So as you can see, pet food regulations are something we’re very passionate about and why you can count on us as being one of the top safe dog food brands in the industry.

Quality control

Our dehydrated dog food and cat food undergoes comprehensive testing as part of our Quality Control program to ensure we’re only producing safe dog food and cat food. Finished products are tested on a routine basis for:

• Bacteria including: salmonella, E-coli, and listeria
• Yeast and mold
• Contaminants such as heavy metals & melamine
• Verification of pH and proximates (protein, fat, fiber and moisture).
• We also conduct regular random testing to ensure various other nutrient values for vitamins and minerals, are within the correct and guaranteed parameters.

The Honest Kitchen is also an approved member of Green America, which places a high priority on sustainability, green business and fair-trade. Businesses such as The Honest Kitchen, which bear the Green America Seal, operate in ways that support workers, communities, and protect the environment.

Taste Test from humans!

In addition to all of these pet food regulations, we actually taste every ingredient that goes into our recipes, as part of our product development process, and our finished products are tasted as part of a standard human food organoleptic test, after production. If it’s not safe for us to eat, it’s not considered safe dog food.

Dehydration

Preserving food by dehydration is one of the oldest and most efficient methods of food processing. We’ve taken this time-tested method and used it to create a healthier type of pet food with more nutritional bang for your hard earned buck.

Our dehydration process gently removes the moisture from our whole food ingredients, but still maintains all of the nice vitamins and minerals that we get by using real fruits, veggies and lean meats.

Check out our green beans to the left – before and after dehydration. They are still green, maintaining all the valuable phytonutrients important for pet health!

Here is how our food is made:

Meat & Fish

• Gently steamed to eliminate pathogens without irradiation
• Meats are removed from dehydration after reaching a specific temperature
• The entire process (including steaming) takes about 45 minutes

Fruits & Vegetables

• Dehydrated using warm air to gently blow away the moisture
• A slow process that takes several hours
• Produce is still considered ‘raw’ after dehydration is complete
• All of our leafy greens are steamed. Learn more
  

Potatoes & Grains

• Flash heated (and rolled in the case of our grains) to help break down cellulose, which aids in digestion
• Then gently dehydrated to remove the remaining moisture