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The Farmer's Dog: Facts, Recalls & Verified Foods
The Farmer's Dog is made by The Farmer's Dog (independent, venture-backed operating company; no corporate parent), founded 2015 — it scores green on 1 of 4 WSAVA-aligned criteria we track (1 red, 2 undisclosed), no FDA recalls on record, and 0 of the 4 The Farmer's Dog foods we've verified carry an AAFCO feeding-trial statement.
THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — · 4 The Farmer's Dog 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.
1 of 4 criteria confirmed yes · 1 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.
Fetched source explicitly states recipes are created by board-certified veterinary nutritionists. WebSearch results (brand's own digest pages, which returned 403 on fetch) named on-staff nutritionists such as Rae Sires DVM DACVIM(Nutrition), Renee Streeter DVM DACVIM(Nutrition), and Joseph Wakshlag DVM PhD DACVIM(Nutrition), but I could not fetch a page naming them, so names are unverified by a primary fetch.
source & quote
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Contrary report also notes founders 'spoke with over 200 factories before finding one that would manufacture for The Farmer's Dog' — uses contract manufacturer(s), not its own owned plant.
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No feeding-trial AAFCO statement found on the 4 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.
2 PubMed-indexed papers carry this brand's name in an author affiliation — but without a recognized pet-nutrition research arm we can't confirm these are the company's own studies rather than unrelated name matches (surnames, the taxonomic family "Canidae", institutions). We don't count it as confirmed research.
source
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 The Farmer's Dog
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
The Farmer's Dog (independent, venture-backed operating company; no corporate parent)
source
Independent DTC startup per Contrary Research business breakdown; the founding/launch quote is from that report. No parent company. Legal entity commonly listed as The Farmer's Dog, Inc. (not confirmed by a fetched primary source).
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Founded
2015
source
Contrary Research states launched 2015. A WebSearch result summary of the brand's own about-us page cited 2014 (company/idea origin vs. product launch); about-us page itself returned HTTP 403 and could not be fetched to confirm.
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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 The Farmer's Dog.
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 The Farmer's Dog's labels
Computed directly from the official-label data we've extracted for this brand — never estimated.
Foods verified
4
4 dog
Feeding-trial validated
0
of 4 (0%)
Formulated to meet
0
AAFCO paper calculation
Label transparency
28%
avg. fields disclosed
The foods
Foods from The Farmer's Dog we've verified
Every one links to its own Verified Label — guaranteed analysis, AAFCO statement, and (where priced) cost per day.