How to read the Verified Label

We remove the water mathematically so every food lands on the same scale, regardless of form.

Illustrative example, not a specific product — see a live panel on any product page.

1. 1As-fed label value — exactly what's printed on the bag: a legal minimum guarantee, not a measured average, and it still includes the food's moisture content.
2. 2Dry-matter value (the large number) — what we actually display and compare across foods, computed from the as-fed value.
3. 3Corpus anchor text — where this number sits among every dry food we've verified. Section 3 below explains the dot and track underneath it.

Illustrative examples — two possible states a food's row can be in, shown side by side for comparison; a single real product only ever shows one of the two.

1. 1When a brand discloses ash on its label (common on wet and cat food, rarer on dry dog food), the carb estimate is computed entirely from disclosed numbers — the row reads as a normal computed value.
2. 2When ash isn't disclosed, we assume a typical 8% dry-matter ash content so the row can still show something useful — but we flag it amber and say so directly in the row. This is the only assumption anywhere on the site; every other computed field combines disclosed label numbers with no estimation.

Illustrative example (kcal/cup density) — see live anchors on any product page.

1. 1The blue dot — this exact food's position along every verified dry food's sorted values for that metric, from lowest to highest.
2. 2The faint tick at the midpoint — the corpus median: the typical, middle-of-the-pack food. A dot right on the tick means "ordinary."
3. 3The plain-English text above the track spells out the percentile so you never have to eyeball the dot alone — and it always names the median's actual value, not just a percentile rank.

When a food's form is wet or fresh, or the underlying value isn't disclosed, the row shows "no corpus anchor" instead of a dot — we never fabricate a position for a food we can't honestly place. Currently 494 verified dry foods make up the anchor corpus (protein median 30% dry matter).

Both statements are real AAFCO categories — a given food carries one or the other, never both.

1. 1Feeding trials — the stronger claim: "Animal feeding tests using AAFCO procedures substantiate that [this food] provides complete and balanced nutrition." The recipe was actually fed to real dogs under a defined protocol.
2. 2Formulated to meet — the more common claim: the recipe was calculated on paper against AAFCO's nutrient profiles, with no feeding trial required. Most foods on the market, including many good ones, use this route — it isn't a red flag by itself, but it's a meaningfully different level of evidence than a feeding trial.

Illustrative combination of states — not one real product's actual flags.

Notice the legume flag in particular: the FDA's DCM investigation (2018–2023) never established that legume position causes heart disease — see why we don't checkmark taurine/DCM risk. We report legume position as a fact from the FDA's own inquiry, not as a verdict.

Illustrative example — 11/15 disclosed fields.

1. 1This is a completeness signal, not a quality judgment. A food at 15/15 could still be a mediocre recipe; a food at 8/15 isn't automatically worse — it usually means the brand (or our best available source for it) simply publishes less. Use it to know how much you can verify, not to rank foods.

The transparency count, the corpus size behind every anchor, and the source link are all printed together in the panel's footer — so the provenance of every number above it is one scroll away, not buried in a separate page.