Instinct: Facts, Recalls & Verified Foods
Instinct is made by Agrolimen, founded 2002 — it scores green on 2 of 4 WSAVA-aligned criteria we track (0 red, 2 undisclosed), no FDA recalls on record, and 0 of the 3 Instinct foods we've verified carry an AAFCO feeding-trial statement.
THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — · 3 Instinct foods in our corpus
The scorecard
WSAVA-aligned criteria
The World Small Animal Veterinary Association's nutrition guidelines suggest four questions to ask any pet food maker before you buy. Most "best dog food" sites skip straight to ingredient vibes and star ratings — we publish the actual answers instead, each sourced, or marked honestly undisclosed when we can't confirm it.
2 of 4 criteria confirmed yes · 0 confirmed no · 2 undisclosed. Undisclosed is common, especially for smaller brands — it means we couldn't confirm an answer from a public source, not that the answer is unfavorable.
Vets page names Dr. Susan Wynn, DVM, DACVIM (Nutrition) — a board-certified veterinary nutritionist — and refers to 'our on staff Board Certified Veterinary Nutritionist.' DACVIM (Nutrition) is the ACVN-equivalent board certification.
source & quote
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Site states Instinct makes food in 'our own facilities' (company-operated plants in Lincoln, Nebraska). Source language specifically covers raw production and does not address whether any dry/canned lines use co-packers, so not classified 'mixed.'
source & quote
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No feeding-trial AAFCO statement found on the 3 labels we’ve verified for this brand, and no company-wide claim was found either. Most pet foods are only "formulated to meet" AAFCO profiles (a paper calculation) rather than fed to real animals in trials — this is common, not necessarily a red flag.
Count of PubMed-indexed records with the entity in an author affiliation (animal/pet-domain filtered). A reproducible FLOOR, not a total: affiliation strings vary and some research is published under institute names. research_entity_affiliation is recorded only for manufacturers with a dedicated pet-nutrition research arm; brand_affiliation.count is null where the brand name is an ambiguous homonym.
These four checks come from WSAVA's global nutrition guidelines for evaluating a pet food manufacturer — not our own opinion score. Read our full methodology →
The company
Who makes Instinct
Ownership and history, each sourced independently — private-label and co-packed brands often hide the actual manufacturer behind the name on the bag.
Parent company
Agrolimen
source
Instinct is the flagship brand of Nature's Variety, wholly owned by Barcelona, Spain-based FMCG group Agrolimen. Agrolimen took a JV stake in 2014 and bought out remaining shareholders in May 2016.
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Founded
2002
source
About Us footer states 'EST. 2002'; brand originally known as Nature's Variety, founded by the Milligan family.
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Headquarters
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
source
Corporate HQ St. Louis, MO; primary manufacturing is in Lincoln, Nebraska (separate from HQ).
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The safety record
FDA recall history
Joined from the FDA's own Animal & Veterinary recall feed (2019–present) plus curated pre-2019 records — the same live-checked feed as our full recall database, filtered to Instinct.
Join of data/recalls.json (FDA Animal & Veterinary recall feed, 2019-present) + data/recalls_historical.json. This is NOT a complete lifetime recall history; recalls predating 2019 (or absent from the FDA datatable) are not represented unless curated in recalls_historical.json.
The corpus
What we've verified from Instinct's labels
Computed directly from the official-label data we've extracted for this brand — never estimated.
Foods verified
3
3 dog
Feeding-trial validated
0
of 3 (0%)
Formulated to meet
0
AAFCO paper calculation
Label transparency
47%
avg. fields disclosed
The foods
Foods from Instinct we've verified
Every one links to its own Verified Label — guaranteed analysis, AAFCO statement, and (where priced) cost per day.