Pet food fit for Humans
You heard that right, not only can your pets eat The Honest Kitchen pet food, you can too! Though it might be a bit bland as canines and humans have very different palettes. The Honest Kitchen pet food is considered Human Grade. What this means is that The Honest Kitchen uses foods that are fit for human consumption (aka Food Grade or Edible foods as legally defined by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO)) in their food for your pets.
On the other hand, regular pet foods like kibbles are made with Feed Grade food, which is a finished product unsuitable for humans. Basically, Feed Grade ingredients are waste products of the human food industry. The bulk of these ingredients are rendered by-products derived from meat slaughtering and processing plants, dead animals from farms and other facilities, as well as fats, grease, and other food waste from restaurants and stores.
In contrast, Human Grade foods are clean, pristine ingredients that are free of chemicals, preservative and fillers. Now between the two, which would you pick for your precious pet?
Human Grade vs Feed Grade
We believe that our pets should enjoy the natural goodness of food like we do. Which is why The Honest Kitchen strives to put together nutritionally balanced meals that are minimally processed and made with whole-food, human-grade ingredients in dehydrated form. This keeps our food as close to freshness as possible and still chock full of natural nutrition.
Our Human Grade label
AAFCO does not typically allow pet food brands to label themselves as Human Grade for fear that people might mistakenly or deliberately eat the food themselves. However, The Honest Kitchen recently successfully renewed the claim with approval from the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which now allows us to use the term “human grade” on all our product labels.
In appealing for such a label to be used on all The Honest Kitchen products, the company has had to provide extremely detailed documentation from each of our suppliers to verify the human edible status of every ingredient used in our recipes.
“We require our vendors to provide us with a signed Human Edible Status Verification document each year, along with a Statement of Integrity, which promises that the ingredient we’re purchasing meets a specific set of criteria,” explained company founder and CEO Lucy Postins. “They verify that every ingredient is non-‐GMO, not irradiated, not sourced from (or grown or processed in) China, and also document any applicable sustainability traits, such as Organic certification, Fair Trade, Free-‐range and so on.”
Not just good food
It doesn’t just stop there. Making sure your pets get quality nutrition is only half the plan. The Honest Kitchen also ensures that production standards are very different from that of kibble manufacturers and other pet food plant standards. The maintenance of HACCP plans and other food safety measures are strictly adhered to and the company has also implemented a system of independent and internal vendor audits as a secondary measure.