BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene)

Preservative · evidence: Neutral · on 4 of 2,354 verified labels

BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) appears on 4 of the 2,354 pet food labels we have verified against the official product label — 0.2% of the corpus. That is 4 dog foods (0.4% of the dog corpus) and 0 cat foods (0.0% of the cat corpus), which makes it substantially more a dog-food ingredient than most discussion admits. Nobody publishes that split because computing it means reading every label.

What it is, and why it is in the food

A synthetic antioxidant used to keep fats from going rancid. EFSA considers BHT an efficacious antioxidant and found it safe for the animal species with adequate data at up to 150 mg/kg complete feed, with consumer exposure well below the acceptable daily intake; for some species a conclusion could not be drawn only because data were lacking, not because harm was shown. Evidence of a concern in dogs at typical pet-food inclusion levels is limited.

The evidence base is moderate: real studies exist, but the number of them is small enough that a single new trial could move the picture.

How common it is, and where it sits on the label

Ingredients are listed by pre-cooking weight, so position carries information: something in the first five is present in bulk, something near the end is a trace addition. BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) is in the first five ingredients on none of the 4 foods that contain it, which tells you it is added in small quantities in every case.

Every food that contains it, cheapest calories first

Ranked by cost per 1,000 kcal, which is the only price basis that survives different bag sizes and moisture levels. 3 of the 4 foods containing bht (butylated hydroxytoluene) have a matched price; the rest are verified but unpriced.

“Check price” links go to a retailer and we may earn a commission — it does not change what is in this table, which is ranked purely on verified cost per 1,000 kcal. Full affiliate disclosure.

Showing the 3 cheapest of 4. The complete list, including unpriced foods, is in the JSON endpoint.

Comparable foods that do not list it

Most people searching an ingredient name want the other half of the answer: what to buy instead. These are verified dry dog foods — the same species and form as most of the foods above, so the comparison is like for like — that do not list bht (butylated hydroxytoluene) anywhere in their ingredients, cheapest per 1,000 kcal first.

Avoiding one ingredient is rarely a good reason to switch on its own. Use this table the way you would use any other single filter — alongside the AAFCO statement, the protein figure and the recall record, all of which are on each food's page.

What we don’t know

Our figure counts what manufacturers print. An ingredient that arrives inside another component — a preservative already in the fish meal, say — does not have to be declared separately by the pet-food maker, so a count from labels is a floor, not a ceiling. We also cannot see inclusion rate: a label tells you bht (butylated hydroxytoluene) is present and roughly where it sits by weight, never how much.

The specific gap for preservatives is carry-over. A preservative added by a supplier to a component — most commonly to fish meal, before it ever reaches the pet-food plant — does not have to be declared by the pet-food maker. So a preservative-free ingredient list is evidence about the manufacturer’s own additions and nothing more. We do not translate any of this into a score. There is no honest way to weigh one ingredient against a food’s AAFCO substantiation, its recall history and its cost, and sites that do it anyway are making the weighting up.

Sources

• EFSA FEEDAP Panel — Safety and efficacy of a feed additive consisting of butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) for all animal species (EFSA Journal) (2022)
• Prevalence figures: Verified Pet Food Data corpus, 2,354 labels verified against official product labels. Machine-readable, CC BY 4.0.

Related ingredients

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  On 1,172 labels (49.8%). Well supported.

• Rosemary extract

  On 600 labels (25.5%). Well supported.

• BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole)

  On 12 labels (0.5%). Contested.

• Ethoxyquin

  On 1 labels (0.0%). Contested.

Frequently asked

All 35 ingredients we found on a real label are indexed on the ingredient hub. To see how these fields are read off a label in the first place, start with how to read a pet food label.