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In order to make their foods anywhere near affordable, RF producers must search the ingredient market for items that can carry the name of real food but may in fact be only a hollow shell of the real thing. Inferior meat and organ ingredients, heat processed grains and vegetable riffraff (for example "broccoli" on a label may really be broccoli stems - like eating a branch from an apple tree rather than the apple) are used because they are of low cost. That is not to say the marketing brochures and labels do not make it appear as though the brand is not a true gourmet meal. If one reviews the various labels it becomes clear that the race is on to see who can put the fanciest and most exotic ingredients on labels ... as if that is the road to pet health. (It is not.) In a brief ingredient survey this is what we found:

Every manner of "pureed" vegetable
Organic beef, rabbit, chicken, turkey, goat, lamb, duck, pork
Organic honey
Organic papaya, persimmons, blueberries, oranges, apples, pears
Organic yogurt
Organic alfalfa, millet, quinoa and barley sprouts
Wheat grass
Nettles
Bok choy
Cultured kefir
Cod liver oil
Capsicum
Watermelon


The reader is challenged to go to the store and total up the cost of such ingredients. Some of the organic ingredients can cost over $15 per pound. But the RF diets containing them can retail for as little as $2-4 per pound. Take away margins for distributors and retail stores and the producer is selling them wholesale for close to a dollar per pound. Now on top of the cost of ingredients is the production, advertising, packaging, freezing and in some cases a sales force making six figures. Something most certainly does not add up. The only thing that can be missing is true ingredient quality. But how can the label say these expensive ingredients are in the food? All the producer needs to do is put in pinches of the expensive ingredients just to say they are there.

The only economic hope for a RF producer is to create the perception of "value added." They simply could not put the costly ingredients in the food to any degree and make a profit for themselves and all the middlemen up and down the chain. The price they would have to charge would be ridiculous. In effect, in order to be successful, producers must become accomplished at propaganda, not health and nutrition.

Consumers interested in cutting through to the truth do themselves and their pets a service by going to the grocery store with a list of the ingredients ostensibly in a RF diet. Although some RF diets in the lower price range appear to not be attempting to mislead, consumers should do the math comparing the exotic ingredients in RF pet foods to the prices for the real thing in the store and decide for themselves whether either value or honesty resides in RF products.

SRF Response – We use common easily found fruits and vegetables from a reliable source. We use things like carrots, broccoli, romaine and apples.  We use high grade poultry raised in barns, not caged or on a conveyor belt. We use high grade beef not fed growth hormone enhanced grain and not animals from dirty feed lots. We do not use organic or free range products because the prices are prohibitive and they are not found in abundance. We do believe the Author is correct about some raw food produces that seem to be making claims beyond the limits of reality. Not everybody does it truthfully and professionally in this fastest growing segment of pet food, SRF does however.

It is not clear what “high grade” means. If it means no “fillers,” “by-products,”  “low grade ingredients,” “corn and wheat covered with yellow grease, tallow, and rendered digest,”  “4D beef,” “putrefying raw material,” “downers not fit for human consumption,” “smutty, moldy, contaminated cereal,” “masked bad smells,” “glop produced at ten tons per hour,” “infested raw material,” “toxin laden,” and  “rats in conveyors and silos that are never cleaned,” then most other pet foods are high grade as well. With regard to “some raw food produces (sic) that seem to be making claims beyond the limits of reality,” SRF is guilty as well when they claim to have complete knowledge of nutrition, biochemistry, and biology—the requisite to making a complete and balanced food.