You already do this for yourself. You read the label on your own protein bar, you know why one olive oil is eight dollars and another is thirty, you can smell "natural flavors" hiding something. The only reason you weren't doing that for your dog's food is nobody handed you the same ninety seconds of information. So we did it for you, and we wrote down exactly how, so you can check our work instead of taking our word for it.
Every product here was scored before it went up, against this written test. In September 2026 we scored all 38 products we were carrying. Seventeen came off the shelf. One of the things we corrected was a claim we had been making about our own kit. The results are here.
The five checks, and what each one is worth
A product is scored out of 100 on each check. The checks are weighted, because they are not equally important. An ingredient panel that lies is worse than a company with a thin About page.
| Check | Weight | What we are actually asking |
|---|---|---|
| Ingredient Truth | 40% | Does the back of the bag support the front of the bag? We want a named animal protein at the top, every ingredient legible, and no claim the panel cannot carry. A bag that says grain free over a panel that starts with oat flour fails here. |
| Clinical Evidence | 20% | If the product promises something, is there evidence in dogs that it does it? Food does not need a trial to be food, so the bar for a plain meal or a single ingredient treat is low. A joint supplement making a joint claim is held to what the research actually found. |
| Recall History | 15% | We read the brand's FDA recall record and the manufacturer's, all of it. One old recall, handled openly, is not a failure. A pattern is. So is a recall nobody ever explained. |
| Sourcing | 15% | Do we know which country it came from and who made it? "Globally sourced from trusted partners" is not an answer to that question. |
| Brand Integrity | 10% | Does the company behave the way it advertises? A brand selling independence while owned by a multinational loses points here. So does one that will not answer a direct question about its own panel. |
How a score becomes a grade
| Grade | Score | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A | 90 and up | Nothing hidden. We could not find a gap worth telling you about. |
| B | 80 to 89 | Good product, and there is something we still want from the maker. Whatever that is, it is written on the product page. |
| C | 65 to 79 | Not good enough to sell. Usually a real gap: a missing adequacy statement, a claim the panel does not support. |
| D | 50 to 64 | Something is wrong with how it is described or what is in it. |
| F | Below 50 | We will not sell it at any margin. |
We carry B and above. There is no exception for a product that sells well, and no exception for one of ours.
The logic, not the magic
Every claim on this site has to survive being explained. Not "clinically proven wellness formula." A sentence you could repeat to a friend at the dog park without sounding like you're reading off a bag. Zinc and citrate salts slow how fast plaque turns into tartar, that's a mechanism. "Enzymatic action" with no enzyme in the ingredient list, that's a word doing a job it can't back up. If we can't tell you why something works, we either find out or we stop saying it works.
Safety can override the score
A product can pass on paper and still be a bad idea for a dog. So we ask a separate question that no weighting can outvote: is this safe for the animal it is sold for? Tooth fracture risk, choking and obstruction risk, pathogen handling on anything raw, anything toxic, and whether the serving size on the bag is reasonable.
In September that question pulled a product that had otherwise scored high enough to argue about. We sell a dental kit. We were also selling antler chews, and antlers are one of the things veterinary dentists name specifically as a cause of fractured teeth. Both of those things cannot be true in the same store.
What we do not score on
Price. We think about value constantly and we will tell you when a bag is charging for a story instead of for protein. But price is not one of the five checks, and we would rather say that plainly than let you assume a grade includes something it does not.
What happens when something fails
It comes off the shelf the same day. Then we email the maker and tell them exactly which check it failed and what document would change our mind, because most failures are missing paperwork rather than bad food. A freeze dried meal without an AAFCO adequacy statement is not necessarily a bad meal. It is a meal we cannot verify, and those are different problems with different fixes.
If they send the document, we re-score it and it comes back. We would rather have a supplier fix something than lose them, and we would rather lose them than hand you a bag we cannot explain.
When we are the one who got it wrong
The toothpaste in our own Fresh Breath Starter Kit was described as enzymatic on our product page, in our page title, in our image captions and in two of our articles. We went to read the panel properly and it contains no enzyme. It works through zinc and citrate salts with silica as a mild abrasive, which is a real mechanism and a defensible one, but it is not the mechanism we had been naming.
Nobody caught that but us, and it would have been easy to quietly change the words. We would rather write it down here. A standard you only apply to other people is not a standard, it is marketing. And this is exactly why we insist on mechanisms instead of adjectives: the logic exposed our own mistake. The magic version would have let it slide for years.
Three things we will never do
- No paid placements. No brand pays to be here and no brand can. There is no rate card, because there is nothing to buy.
- No public blacklist. We publish the grade of everything we sell and everything we have pulled, because we had a commercial relationship with those products and you deserve to know why they went. We do not publish scores for products we never carried. If you want to know how something would do, email us and we will read its panel with you.
- No medical promises. We are not veterinarians. We tell you what is in a product, what the evidence says, and where it runs out. Your vet knows your dog.
Why we're this particular about it
Not because your dog will notice the difference between a B and a C at dinner. Because you will, the next time someone asks what you feed him and you actually know the answer instead of pointing at a bag you picked because the box looked trustworthy. That's the whole product here: not a better bowl, a better answer when someone asks you why.
Ask us to read a label
Send us a bag you are curious about and we will run it through the five checks and send you the working. Free, whether or not we sell it, and whether or not it passes. Email hello@truvapets.com.