Pet food labelling law permits a great deal of vagueness, and the vagueness is not accidental. “Meat and animal derivatives” is a legal category, not a description. “With salmon” can, in some jurisdictions, mean the product contains as little as 4% salmon. “Salmon flavour” needs no salmon at all.
None of this is fraud. It exists because commodity supply chains need to substitute freely: when a protein’s price moves, a manufacturer buying on the spot market wants the freedom to change what is in the bag without changing the label or the recipe code.
The trade-off we made
We buy on contract from named suppliers instead. Our salmon comes from Loch Duart in Sutherland, our chicken from a free-range farm in Norfolk, our beef from a cooperative of grass-fed herds in Herefordshire. Twelve suppliers, all of them nameable, all of them visited.
This costs more and it is operationally worse: when a supplier has a bad month, we cannot simply buy elsewhere, so a recipe comes off the menu for a fortnight. You will have noticed this if you have been with us since spring — turkey disappeared for three weeks in April, and we told you why.
What traceability is and is not
Naming a farm does not by itself make food more nutritious. A traceable chicken and an anonymous one can be nutritionally identical. What traceability buys is accountability: if something is wrong with a batch, we know within an hour which animals ate it and where it came from, and so do you.
It also buys a kind of discipline. It is much harder to quietly downgrade an ingredient when the ingredient has a name, an address, and a farmer who reads our emails.