In September 2026 we re-scored all 38 products we were carrying against the Truva Standard. Seventeen came off the shelf. This page is all of them, with the specific reason for each.
We are publishing this for a simple reason. You cannot tell if a standard is real from the outside, you can only tell from what it costs the company holding it. A standard nobody ever fails is not a standard, and you have no way to check our logic unless we show you the cases where the logic actually cut something. So here they are, including the one that was ours.
None of this is a verdict on a company. Every reason below is a checkable fact about a label or a missing document, and most of them are fixable. Where a maker sends us what we asked for, the product comes back and we will say so here.
The package said one thing and the panel said another
This is the failure we take hardest, because the whole point of reading the back is that it should agree with the front.
- Wonder Bark Everyday treats, all eight flavours. Sold as grain free. Every one of the eight panels leads with oat flour, and one adds rolled oats on top. Oats are a grain. The maker's own marketing only ever claims wheat free, which is accurate. The grain free line came from further down the supply chain and we repeated it without checking.
- Wonder Bark Happy Birthday treats. Same grain free problem, plus a no added sugar claim on a recipe containing molasses.
- Jeffers Chicken Jerky, 24 oz. We sold this as single ingredient chicken breast. The maker's panel lists six ingredients, including glycerin, salt and natural flavors. It may well be a perfectly good jerky. It is not a single ingredient jerky, and that is the reason anyone was buying it from us.
- Farm To Pet Beef Treat Topper. Described as low fat directly above a guaranteed analysis reading 39 percent crude fat minimum. We have asked Farm To Pet whether that figure is a misprint. If it is, this one comes straight back, because everything else about it is clean.
Sold as a meal, without the document that makes it a meal
A complete diet is supposed to carry an AAFCO nutritional adequacy statement. It is one sentence on a bag and it is the difference between food and a topper. Five products were sold to us as meals and we could not find that sentence anywhere, including on the maker's own site.
- Montana Dog Food Co Adventure Fuel, all three recipes (chicken, beef, surf and turf).
- Stella & Chewy's Dog Shredrs, beef and lamb, and beef and salmon. Both are described as complete and balanced with no published adequacy statement and no calorie content.
We want to be precise about what this is and is not. We are not saying these are bad foods. We are saying that a bag claiming to be a whole diet has one job on the label, and we could not confirm it was done. We have asked both makers for the statement. That single document brings all five back.
The promise outran the evidence
Food does not need a clinical trial to be food. A product that promises to do something specific is held to what the research actually found.
- Arthri-Pawz glucosamine joint supplement, $49.99. This is the one we should have caught first. A 2022 systematic review pooled 72 trials of glucosamine and chondroitin in dogs and cats and concluded they should no longer be recommended for pain management in osteoarthritis. The effect size favoured the placebo groups. The Merck Veterinary Manual reaches the same conclusion. We had already published that finding in our own article on glucosamine while continuing to sell the product. That is indefensible and it is the clearest thing on this page. If your dog is stiff, the same review found omega 3s did work.
- Health Extension Lifetime Vitamins. A good panel with real per tablet amounts, sold as a daily multivitamin. A dog eating a complete and balanced food already gets those vitamins by definition, which is what complete means. Veterinary nutritionists are consistent on this. There are dogs who need supplementation, and their vet should be the one deciding it.
- Health Extension Dog Dental Bones. Makes a plaque claim without the Veterinary Oral Health Council acceptance that would support it, and at one to two bones a day it can reach a third of a small dog's daily calories.
We could not tell you how to use it
- Omega Pawz liquid omega 3, $39. Fish oil is the one supplement category with genuinely good evidence in dogs, which makes this the most frustrating cut on the page. The bottle does not state EPA or DHA per serving, the fish species, or the origin. Omega 3s are dosed on EPA and DHA content. Without those numbers there is no dose, only a spoonful of oil and a hope.
- Health Extension Skin & Coat. Contains vitamin A and vitamin D and publishes an amount for neither. Those two are fat soluble, they accumulate, and we were cross selling this alongside another product that also contains both.
One we pulled purely on safety
- Deer antler chews. This one did not fail on paperwork. Cornell's Riney Canine Health Center names antlers twice as a cause of fractured teeth. The Merck Veterinary Manual lists them among the hard objects that fracture the carnassial, which is the big chewing tooth at the back and the most expensive one in the mouth to lose. No antler product has ever held a VOHC seal. We had written all of that in our own article ranking dental chews, where antlers come last. A store whose front door is a toothbrush cannot also sell the thing that breaks teeth.
One that could not clear the first check
- Open Farm Kind Earth Plant Pate. An honest label on a food that is upfront about containing no meat, poultry or dairy, from a company we rate highly and still stock five other products from. The first of our five checks asks for a named animal protein, and this food structurally cannot have one. It also carries a lifetime adequacy claim with no long term outcome data behind it in dogs. We would rather not sell the one product in our range we cannot apply our own first question to.
And one of ours
The Bluestem toothpaste came off as a standalone product for two reasons, and the first one is our fault.
We described it as enzymatic. On the product title, on our Fresh Breath Starter Kit page, in the page description, in the image captions and in two articles. Then we sat down and read the panel: sorbitol, hydrated silica, water, glycerin, trisodium citrate, flavour, potassium benzoate, citric acid, disodium EDTA, sodium carboxymethyl cellulose, potassium sorbate, zinc chloride. There is no enzyme in it.
It is still a reasonable toothpaste. Zinc and citrate salts interfere with how fast plaque hardens into tartar, and the silica is a mild abrasive, and none of that needed us to invent a mechanism. That's the part that should bother you a little: the real mechanism was fine. We reached for the more impressive sounding word anyway, and that's exactly the habit this whole page exists to break. We have corrected every page. We also want to be clear about a second thing while we are here: no item in the Fresh Breath Starter Kit carries the VOHC seal. The bluestem product that has one is the water additive, which is not in the box.
The kit itself is still on the shelf, because brushing is the best evidenced thing you can do for a dog's teeth at home and that has not changed. The paste is on a discontinued path at the manufacturer, so we are evaluating a replacement now rather than when the last pallet clears.
What happens to a pulled product
It comes off the same day. We email the maker with the specific check it failed and the exact document or correction that would change the answer. If it arrives, we re-score and relist, and we will update this page when we do. Most of these are paperwork, not food.
If you bought any of these from us and you want a refund, you do not need a reason and you do not need to send anything back. Email hello@truvapets.com and we will take care of it.
If you're reading this far, you're the exact person this page was written for: the one who wants to be able to say they checked. You just did.