Good to know what’s inside!!

We all have the same intention: We just want the best for our dogs! At first glimpse many brands of dog food appear to be of good quality! But has the dog food really the quality promised on the bag? A closer inspection of the declaration is mandatory if you really want to be sure what is inside the food.

But nevertheless there are several tricks to disguise quality and ingredients. In general there are two kinds of declarations: the open and the closed one. Both have one thing in common the ingredients are listed in descending order of weight.
 

Closed declaration
The ingredients are summarised in groups. For example wheat and other grains are subsumed under the collective term cereals. If gluten or other flour are added the group is named “cereals and by-products of plant origin”.

The same is true for the amount of meat. Here we have the subsumed group “meat and animal-by products”. This kind of declaration just gives an overview of the amounts, not of the kind and quality of the processed meat.
 

Open declaration:
In the open declaration all ingredients are listed individually. Does that sound good? Generally it does but even here it is possible to deceive. The producers are allowed to specify different forms of a substance separately.

In practice that means that meat is on first place of the declaration, although the sum of the different cereals have a higher amount than the part of meat ( for example cereals broken into: grounded corn, maize gluten, wheat flour, wheat).

In addition there could be also other surprises. If on the label on the front side it says “Tasty Chicken”, the reverse side will show that it is just “meat and animal-by products (min 4 % chicken, cereals and plant by-products, sugar, oils and fats, minerals).

In fact that means 96 % of the ingredients are hidden and just 4 % of chicken are indeed inside the dog food and it remains unclear whether it is high valuable meat or animal-by products such as claws and beaks.

If the food contains 4 % chicken, 4 % beef and 4 % lamb manufacturers are able to produce three kinds of dog food from one recipe with the same declaration.

Therefor it is worth to read declarations very carefully: to be sure that just those things come into the food bowls which really belong there.
 

Platinum always stands for transparent and easy declarations: All Platinum products contain just those ingredients that are shown in the declaration. For instance: Minimum 83 % of fresh meat or fresh fish, no animal-by products.