Human Grade vs Animal Grade Ingredients

Bill Bookout: Pet peeve of mine for sourcing ingredients: when I see different grades of ingredients. There's animal feed grade ingredients, and there's human grade ingredients. For the most part, I think, supplements use the same ingredients that are utilized in human dietary supplements, but there are some companies out there that have lesser quality ingredients that you know are probably cheaper right, but not necessarily better.

Sara, talk to me about the differences between human grade and feed grade or animal grade, and how you vet those suppliers.

Sara Phillips: So, there can be some animal feed grade materials. It does come back to the certifications that the manufacturing facility holds. So, for example, FoodScience being an SQF facility, we are audited to those standards, and that is a human food. That's Food Safety Modernization Act. We're held to those standards. So, that is one area.

The other area goes back to some things that everyone has hit on today, [which] is vendor qualifications. What vendors are you buying from? Are you buying from sort of a marketplace brokerage where you're shopping the most common one? You're buying it off this marketplace style environment versus going through a broker or distributor.

Manufacturers again, they should really be able to demonstrate that they can show that exact lot of material, where it came from, what factory, etc. That can be a lot of work if done properly. Perhaps a better avenue is to qualify a very reputable vendor who's always meeting that CofA who's always having the high quality material.

So, we have audits. We have certification levels. We have the vendor qualification aspect. And then you know, what do you want to put out there in your product under your brand? There's probably an inexpensive way to do most everything, but we think personally about anything that we buy ourselves, that we really need to be of high quality. For me, it's generally running sneakers. I'm going to drop some money on running sneakers and buy them from a brand that I know and trust, and that works well for me. I could get $10 sneakers, but they're not going to work. It's very much, I think a similar situation.

Bill Bookout: Yep. Cheap raw materials are typically cheap for a reason. Chondroitin is one that people often get burned by. It's a highly adulterated ingredient.

Dr. Pachel, feed grade or animal grade ingredients versus human grade ingredients, and sourcing thoughts on that.

Dr. Chris Pachel (he/him): Yeah, coming from maybe a little bit of a different angle, I think that the part that always sort of gets me a little bit, from an ethical standpoint, is if we're talking about sort of what I should put in my body versus what a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a dog should put in their body, I'm like why are we drawing a line between these? So, if I'm looking at graded materials as a practitioner, and if I see any of that oh, it's feed grade versus human grade, number one, as you've said so many times, verify first that it's not just a buzzword that's being put out there. Oh, it's human grade, therefore it's…let's make sure.

Bill Bookout: Yeah. Your pet's life and health is no less important than your own or any other family member. Right? They are family members.

Dr. Chris Pachel (he/him): Absolutely and as a veterinarian, first and foremost, that is my responsibility to guide people in that decision-making process. And so, I think that's really my lens on that particular piece. I'm not going to put a different level of quality on my nutrition compared to theirs or my ingredients compared to theirs.

Bill Bookout: Bravo, Dr. Morgan. Additional thoughts?

Dr. Judy Morgan: One hundred percent agree. I never take anything into our e-commerce store unless I have vetted the ingredients, know that they're human grade. It has to be something that I would be willing to eat myself or use on myself. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of things that we use for our family members that are basically labeled for pets, but I know the quality of the ingredients, and they do so much better job than a lot of the human products that are out there that are filled with synthetics and dyes and chemicals, and things that I just don't want in there. So, we're very, very critical, and every once in a while we'll have one of these big blow ups with the feed grade ingredients. We found a tiny ingredient in one supplement about a year and a half ago that we called the company about and said, is this feed grade or human grade. It was one tiny little piece of it, and the problem they were having some quality control. They didn't do their own manufacturing. The supplements were a chew, but they were coming in [inconsistently]. Some were really greasy, some were really dry, and we said there's a problem. We had been using this company for a few years and suddenly there was a problem. And they said, “Oh, well, we're having some manufacturing issues,” and we went, “We’re done. We are sending back everything that we have. You will reimburse us for all of this, because this is not the quality control that we're looking for. And, by the way, now, we have just verified that this one little tiny ingredient out of 20 [ingredients] that are in there is not up to our standards, and so it is out.” And the company was really, really upset with us, and we said, “No, you need to be upset with whoever's doing your manufacturing, who doesn't have good quality control like these things should not come in dry and brittle and crumbly versus literally oil dripping inside the bottle.”

So, for us, we're on top of that quality control, because I literally, I think I've used everything [in our store]. There's probably have 700 products, and I think I've used all of them on my pets or my family, because I want to make sure that this is up to the standards, that if somebody is buying something for me, I want them to know that I will stand behind it, because I know what the background is with the company. For me, a company has to have really high integrity. I need to know the people involved. I need to know what their standards are. And I need to be able to have conversations with them that are very honest and open. Let me see your CofAs. Let me see your sourcing. So really, really critical. For me, feed grade is out, and the same with food that goes into the bowl, any food products that we sell, treat products that we sell, it's going to have to be 100% human grade.

Bill Bookout: Great, great, great discussion, and I think the one capper, and then we'll go to the next section, which is targeted health outcomes, a lot of people think that the pet industry is an unregulated industry. It's not. We're actually more strictly or rigorously regulated than human products. We're regulated at 2 levels, the federal level with FDA Center for veterinary medicine and also potentially the state level, depending on how the statutes in the State are written. So, it is a regulated industry which helps with responsible conduct.