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Zignature Wet Food Zssential Formula package official product image via Amazon

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Zignature Wet Food Zssential Formula

Wet food · all dogs

A formulated-to-meet, turkey-first wet food — $9.57 a day for your 40-lb adult dog.

THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference dog 40 lb · updated 2026-07-12

$50.28 $9.57/day as of 2026-07-12 Check price →
Tell us about your dogevery number on this page updates live ↓
40 lb
For a 40-lb adult: 2¼ cansper day $9.57per day —bag lasts passes 2 fit checks ↓

Joint, kidney, dental or heart concerns? Labels can't honestly answer those — that's vet territory. Why we don't checkmark them →

The evidence

The Verified Label

Every food on this site gets this exact panel — same fields, same order, sourced from the official label — so brands finally become comparable. Corpus dot-anchors currently cover dry food only — this is a wet food, so anchors are omitted below rather than compared across forms.

Verified LabelThe standardized pet-food panel
VPFD № ZIGNAT
verified 2026-07-12

Composition — dry-matter basis

why dry matter
Moisture hides the real recipe: kibble is ~10% water, canned food ~78%. Removing water puts every food on one scale, so these are the only nutrition numbers that can be compared across foods. As-fed label values shown small.
Protein 50%label: 11% min no corpus anchor for this food form
Fat 22.7%label: 5% min no corpus anchor for this food form
Fiber 5.5%label: 1.2% max no corpus anchor for this food form
Est. carbohydrates ash not disclosed → 8% assumed, so this is an estimate ≈8.2%computed no corpus anchor for this food form
Calcium / Phosphorus extended guarantees: none verified yet Not yet verifiedcalcium/phosphorus no ratio to anchor

Calories & cost — for your 40-lb adult dog

Calorie density 431 kcal/can1170 kcal/kg no corpus anchor for this food form
Daily serving2¼ cans
Cost per day$9.57
Bag lasts—

Cost per 1,000 kcal: $9.72. Corpus cost comparisons currently cover dry food only. Serving math uses standard veterinary energy formulas — see the formula.

Standards & ingredients

AAFCO statement
what this means
Two kinds of AAFCO claims exist. Most foods are only "formulated to meet" nutrient profiles — a paper calculation. A smaller set carry the stronger claim: fed to real dogs in AAFCO-procedure trials ("Animal feeding tests using AAFCO procedures substantiate…").
 Formulated to meet · all_life_stages
First five ingredients (by pre-cooking weight)Turkey · Turkey Broth · Turkey Liver · Salmon · Lamb
Named animal protein first; named meals onlyYes
Legumes in first 10 (FDA DCM inquiry)2 (peas, chickpeas)
BHA / BHT preservativesNone on label
Carrageenan (thickener)None
Ethoxyquin
why unknown
When a fish-meal supplier adds ethoxyquin, U.S. rules don't require it on the finished label — so no label can prove its absence for recipes containing fish meal. We report this as a gap rather than guessing.
 None — no fish meal in this recipe

Safety

FDA recalls — Zignature, since 2023None on record
ManufacturerNot confirmed from label
Label transparency 7 of 15 standard fields
Green = verified favorable · amber = gap in the record · red = verified unfavorable · gray = not disclosed / neutral fact.
Source: official label source (official)· price: Amazon, 2026-07-12 · anchors: 494 verified dry dog foods (360 priced) · how to read this label

The fit

For your dog, specifically

Checked for a 40-lb adult with a sensitive stomach — the same published criteria our finder uses. Change your dog above and these update.

✓
Validated for adult dogsAAFCO statement covers adult maintenance.
✓
Passes our sensitive-stomach checksNamed animal protein first, and no unnamed by-products in the ingredient list.
·
Chicken-free recipeNot selected for your dog — but relevant if chicken sensitivity ever comes up.

The source material

The full ingredient list

Every flag on the Verified Label is computed from this list. Ingredients are ordered by pre-cooking weight — the first five carry the most information.

Turkey, Turkey Broth, Turkey Liver, Salmon, Lamb, Duck, Peas, Chickpeas, Alfalfa Meal, Agar-Agar, Minerals (Potassium Chloride, Zinc Sulfate, Iron Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Sodium Selenite, Manganous Oxide, Calcium Iodate), Taurine, Vitamins (Vitamin E Supplement, Vitamin A Supplement, Niacinamide, D-Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid), Salt, Choline Chloride, Potassium Chloride, L-Carnitine

The maker

Who makes this — and how they back it up

The four questions the WSAVA nutrition guidelines tell you to ask a pet-food company. Every answer is sourced or marked as an undisclosed gap — never guessed. This is the "is it made competently?" axis that star-rating sites skip.

Owns its manufacturing Co-packed

Zignature's own site describes all named production facilities as third-party 'partners,' not company-owned plants.

source →
Employs a qualified nutritionist Yes — sourced

Zignature states it contracts a full-time PhD animal nutritionist and DVMs via BSM Partners (a third-party pet nutrition consulting firm), not an in-house employee. No named individual or stated ACVN/ECVCN board certification was found.

source →
AAFCO feeding trials Yes — sourced

Zignature's own feeding-trials page claims the company voluntarily conducts long-term feeding studies beyond AAFCO minimums, even though every SKU in our corpus is labeled with the 'formulated' substantiation statement rather than a 'feeding trial' statement.

source →
Peer-reviewed research None found

A reproducible PubMed search (author-affiliation field, animal/pet-domain filtered) returns zero indexed papers for this brand name. Not proof no research exists — only that none is PubMed-indexed under this exact name.

source →
Parent company Pets Global, Inc. ↗ Founded 2010 ↗ Headquarters / plant Valencia, California, USA ↗ FDA recalls on record None on record

Full company scorecard, sources, and every SKU we've verified for this brand: Zignature brand page →