How much meat is in your dog food?

Did you know, that fresh meat consists of 70% water!

Fresh meat and offal consists of 70 % water on average. Most of this water is removed by heat during the manufacturing of dry food leaving roughly 30 % dry matter, depending on the production method. This allows the raw ingredient to be transported and stored in more environmentally-friendly and sustainable ways.

Essentially every dry food will only contain “dried meat”. But there is no scientific definition for the term “meat ratio”. Some manufacturers use it to describe the proportion of fresh meat in the recipe, while others use it as the total quantity of all animal-derived fresh ingredients. And thenother manufacturers only process dried raw ingredients with an extremely low water content compared to fresh meat. So a genuine comparison is not possible. All we can do is compare the dried proportions.

The animal raw ingredient source that we use at Happy Dog and Happy Cat is meat (from the purely legal viewpoint, only muscle meat can be described as such) along with offal such as heart and liver as these contain lots of important nutrients including vitamin A, selenium and zinc.

We call the two together “animal proteins”. In addition we only specify the actual proportion of dried meat. The meat ratio in many Happy Dog and Happy Cat varieties is therefore much higher than in dry foods from most other manufacturers.This is an important quality feature of high quality pet food.