Label Review #1: Blue Buffalo Wilderness Dry Dog Food

Host Jennifer: Well, welcome back everyone to another episode. And hi, Dan, how are you?

Host Dan: Jen. I'm great. I'm great. The audience has no idea what just transpired over the past half an hour, where you and I basically had to recreate the Apollo 13 moon landing in order to get our computer and microphone headphones set up to work.

Host Jennifer: No, no, <laugh> no issue recording, Huge amount of technical pro on this podcast podcast. We are basically the, you know, technological It's no issues, no issues at all issues at all. Yes we are. As we're in the beginning stages of all of this we're living and learning and you know, it is what it is, you know, sometimes you've got a roll with it.

So we're rolling with it. And we're super excited to dive into today's episode, which is actually something new we're trying. Yep. These different segments. And this is an, a new named segment, but I really love this concept. It's yet to be named officially.

But I do really like this concept of label BS. And what that entails is we're gonna take brand by brand and look at their packaging. Like Dan actually went out to the store and got a bag off the shelf. I have the brand's website ready ago.

We're gonna look through it. And what I like about this concept is we're going to take these claims trademarks call outs on the packaging, and we're going to demystify it, look through the lens of science, black and white of what does it mean and how are these brands kind of learning you in to try our brand.

This is why, so Dan, why is this so motivating to kind of get in here and talk about these brands?

Host Dan: Because it's so hard to be a pet food consumer in this day and age, everybody wants to make good, rational, thoughtful decisions. When they, when it comes to what kinds of products to feed their pet, everyone wants the best that their lifestyle, their budget can afford. But it's incredibly difficult to know what that is. You have all sorts of voices saying all sorts of things, whether they're expressed on packaging, websites, talking heads like us, whatever, and some clarity, and some kind of like see through the mist on some of the issues that tend like some of the strategies that tend to get employed by pet food companies, I think can help people make better decisions. And also the reality, unfortunate reality is that the pet food industry is one of the most poorly industries in the, in the United States right now, basically we could do a whole podcast about what I mean when I say that, but basically the inmates run the asylum, the pet food companies, they're like kind of lobbying group is essentially the same group that sets the regulations on what you have to say on the label, what you can get away with saying on the label and what you can't say on the label. So as a result, all kinds of crazy things end up getting said, or hidden or whatever. And if you're not hip to that reality, and if you can it, and if you haven't like been walked through the ways, the specific things that I'm talking about, then you can just be really easily misled. And so, yeah, like you said, we're gonna like help people understand this better by looking at individual brands, one brand at a time, and talking about some of the specific things that that brand has done and how they're trying to communicate straightforwardly otherwise to, to consumers and the idea, our hope, if we can keep doing this segment, if people enjoy it and get value out of it, we'll do lots of different brands. And so you can look us up, look up how to contact us in the show notes and reach out and tell us, oh, here's the brand I'm feeding right now. Can you tell me about what they're saying and help me understand what this is? That's like, that's the idea here. We're starting with a really popular product. Um, but going from here, hopefully we can get feedback from, from viewers and listeners and do the, uh, brands that they like. Absolutely. Definitely in two way conversation, you bring us the brands that you are maybe even interested in trying, or this is a new in, on the market, or this is a type of, whether it be maybe a fresh food and mm-hmm <affirmative> and why is it different? Like we are here to break it down for you. And at the end of the show, we'll give you some tips and tricks of when you're out shopping for brand. Here's what to look for and kind of ski pass these, these claims, these callouts. So let's dive in. Let's really, we went for a big brand first, right? So yeah, blue Buffalo, everyone really knows this brand, Right? Sure. Blue Buffalo, one of the largest pet food companies in the world, the first, um, first brands to achieve like true scale, other than Purina, a Mars pet care and Hills pet nutrition. Um, they, they framed themselves when they launched as a real alternative to those three old school legacy traditional brands. And particularly they played a big role in launching the grain three segments of the pet food market. They, those legacy brands, Purina Hills Mars typically relied very heavily on grain ingredients, corn and wheat and things like that in their formulations. Blue Buffalo came along and said, we're different. We're grain. We make our pet food without using corn or wheat. And so we're better. Um, this was in the late nineties, early two thousands, I think. And since then they've grown hugely. They've got numerous product lines. What we're looking at today is their blue wilderness product line. We're looking specifically at this chicken recipe, blue wilderness, four dogs, you know, blue Buffalo sells a few different lines of products. They sell products for dogs and cats. They sell 'em in kibble style can style a few different ways. So we're looking at chicken recipe, dog kibble, blue wilderness. Yep. And one of the things we noticed right away was the bag you got from the store, did not have a call out or a version of these wholesome grains. Right. And when I pulled up the website, the packaging all over it is whole some grains. We have a picture of a Wolf right next to a pile of oats and barley and cranberries. The last time I checked wolves do not have pantries in the woods <laugh>. And so I think we should really dive into the front of the package. We have meats, evolutionary diet, right? Yep, exactly. So I, I think the, there are kind of five take home points, um, that at the end will summarize, but kind of the first one that really jumps to mind is the language they use to try to communicate to the consumer that, Hey, if you feed your dog, this it's like feeding your dog like a Wolf. Right. And so you'd argue that the wilderness brand in and of itself is kind of an indication of that, but more, more to the point, the like use of this very prominent image of a Wolf, there's a Wolf on the back of the bag as well. There is, um, the language nature's evolutionary diet, both on the front of the bag and on the back of the bag. Um, let's see. There's, There's a, um, there's a sentence also here on the back of the bag, like their ancestors in the wild dogs love meat. That's why we created blue wilderness do do do. And so basically the first point is that there's a lot of material here that implicitly suggests that this is the kind of food that a Wolf would eat. And so if you think it's, it's a good idea to feed your dog, like it's ancestors eat, you should feed this product. And the problem with that is that this product bears almost zero resemblance to the diet that oh, gray Wolf has ever eaten eats today. Gray wolves are species that are obviously walking around right now. As we speak in the United States, scientists know very well, what they eat and surprise, surprise. It looks nothing like this. More to the point wolves in their natural environments, eat meat and meet alone. It's not that they love meat. It's that? That's all that they eat. When you, when I was living with the biologist, from the Yellowstone Wolf project, they talk about what you'll see when you get to the Carcas of a dead elk or moose or bison or whatever. A pack of S has brought down and finished eating. Okay? So they've taken this animal down. Everybody in the pack has eaten it and they moved on. And when you get there and you look at the Carcas, there are only two things that you typically see, like they'll eat the hide off the animal, but what they don't eat are two things. One is these huge bones. These are like really big, like bison is a mammoth animal. And some of the bones are like this. And even a Wolf can't break 'em down. And so those bones are still there. And then the other thing that's still there is the contents of the stomach of these big plants, eating animals, bison, elk, deer, those kinds of animals rely entirely on plant material. That's what they eat. They eat vegetation and their stomachs, their digestive organs have developed, have evolved to, to support that. And basically what they do is they take all this stuff in and then it sits in their, their digest. It basically ferments inside the like Elk's body for a long period of time. These things are hard to break down churns in there and breaks all down. And so what you've got, if you open up an elk is this big fat wa of grasses and stuff like that. And wolves, when they kill an elk, a bison, whatever, not only will they eat all the meat, most of the bones they'll eat the lining around this stuff, the like lining of the digestive organs, but they leave the wad of plant matter. Um, which is, I always think is a really nice example to show you the extent to which these animals avoid plant material. There are a million other ways to frame it, to explain why the, the, you know, phenotype the kind of like physical characteristics of a Wolf, obviously show that it doesn't eat plant material. There's the studies themselves that have been done that kind of document what wolves eat on a daily basis. And there's even like genetic studies that have been done that show that wolves don't produce certain kinds of enzymes that are used breakdown plants. So it's like take home wolves, don't eat any kind of plants. So they don't take in any kind of carbohydrate. They just eat meat, which means they only eat fat and protein, which is why this product looks nothing. Like what a Wolf typically eats. It's got. Um, if you look at, you don't even have to look at the ingredient so you can see it right there in the image we've got on the screen. Now, cherries, it looks like there's cranberries potatoes, cranberries, excuse me. Um, there's some kind of cereal grain back there. I don't know if that's like barley or oats or what, but, uh, you can look through the Ingra. Here you go. Even better. Yeah. Barley oatmeal, cranberry. There are all kinds of things here. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that obviously, uh, carrots, sorry, those weren't potato carrots. These are all things that wolves don't eat. And not only like are the ingredients, things that wolves don't eat, but the nutritional content, if you think about them in terms of what the, these food products are made up of, what are the nutrients they're made up of? These are things that wolves don't eat, particularly carbohydrate, plant material, cereal, grains, uh, agricultural products typically are the vast majority of the nutrition in there comes from carbohydrate. And that's the, the case here too. And so as a result, what you've got here is you've got this product that without, uh, <laugh>, it's hard to, to like, I want to just say this product, that's about 30% carbohydrate, but as we've talked about ad nausea, now it's actually the case that brands in the president regulatory environment don't have to tell the consumer much carbohydrate is actually in there. So unlike most human use products where you know exactly how much carbohydrate is in there, it gets on the label in pet food brands. You don't have to do that. So it's easier for a brand like blue Buffalo to put a Wolf on the label to use the word evolution or ancestral, but then to make a, a product that's whatever, 30 to 50% carbohydrate and hide it from the consumer. And so that's basically what you've got here. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you've got a lot of suggestion that this is like a Wolf lo like a Wolf's diet, but in reality, it's nothing like it because it relies heavily on all these plant items that contain tons of carbohydrate. Yeah. And I think the guaranteed analysis, we'll jump into that in a second. And back to though these, all these other ingredients that are compiling this whole recipe and how they're also spinning in a very interesting way, this meat, rich chicken first ingredient, though, that may maybe yes. It's the first ingredient. But really when you look at the protein compilation, you look at how much of these other ingredients are you're right. It's all of these other, like these tubers, the other vegetables. And, and they're saying it they're framing it as an antioxidant, rich fruits, vegetables. So they're kind of putting this, they are putting this verbiage. What I would even dare to say this health halo of anything that needs to be added in order to make it cheaper, not use as much protein would, you know, meat first, which is the best for dogs. And they're really putting this halo over all these other ingredients that they're choosing to include, which includes grains, Right? Wholesome grains, sorry, wholesome grains. If you, um, will you scroll back down to like the part where it was showing all the individual ingredients and like what the point they made? Here's the thing is like, there is not a single type of food ingredient that you could put in pet food. That's not something synthetic, anything that's just actual food product. Like you've got the vast majority of these ingredients here where you can't attach some kind of health based claim to it. In, in the vast majority of cases, you could say something like excellent source of blah of thiamine or vitamin B or whatever mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so for any, I mean, there's a laundry list of like those kinds of claims that can be made for any product. And so you see they're doing like exactly that here, it's like, oh, cran. This is, and you go to the encyclopedia and look up what the like micronutrient profile is and slap that on there. And it's not to suggest that they've thoughtfully thought about what micronutrients a dog needs and then come up with, ah, what if we decide we'll put cranberries in there because like every other complete, like in order to sell pet food on a store shelf, in packaging, in the United States, the micronutrient content, what kinds of vitamins minerals, how much are in there has to meet really strict specifications like sci scientific community knows really well, what amount of what various micronutrients dogs need on a regular basis in order to avoid deficiency, does diseases. And so blue Buffalo, just as much as any other brand uses vitamin multivitamin mixes to make sure that all that stuff hits those requirements, uh, very carefully. So it's not like they were like, let's see, we, we think we should put more vitamin B in here. So let's put barley in here. It's like, they're their profiles make? Like, because of the, you know, synthetic multivitamin mix they put in there makes hits all that stuff. In the first case, all this, the reason that cranberries carrots, oatmeal, whatever is put in there has nothing to do with providing specific nutrients to the dog. It's about filling out the recipe with stuff that fee good to the consumer. And that is inexpensive for the producer. That's kind of like the main rub, uh, around like why brands like this are, would rather use plants and carbohydrate material than meats is that they are insanely inexpensive, like a calorie of meat. Uh, nutrition is something like eight to 10 times as expensive as a calorie of plant based like agricultural product based nutrition. A calorie of oatmeal for instance, would cost the producer. Something like one 10th, the cost of a calorie of chicken. And so there's this huge pressure on them to use as much of that cheap stuff as they can get away with while still making you think as a consumer, that what you're feeding is a very meaty, very rich, uh, diet. Yes. And it's very paradoxical to where we started, which is this evolutionary diet, nowhere in the history of wolves to domestic age of dogs, have they picked up of, oh, I'm gonna start eating carrots. I'm gonna start eating flax seed and oatmeal. Right. So I do agree. The framing is very purposeful. <laugh> of, you know, this has, but this has, you know, like you said, this has fiber or this has a certain vitamin in it and it, Yeah, you can do that with any, literally anything, any food product you can make one, you know, these are just one sentence, two sentence claims. You could do it on any kind of food product. Exactly. And going back to your synthetic vitamins to whether it be meets certain standards or make it feel very good to the consumer, like, oh, my dog is getting all these vitamins for its health. This was very interesting to me of, especially as a marketing person and graphic design, it's like, okay, these rich antioxidants, rich life source bits. And I know you have the bag, so would love to see the, for close. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Seems Like so making two different, uh, kibbles. Yep. And Together. So yeah, exactly. So the life source bits are a different color. Okay. And a different shape, but about the same consistency as the, uh, like other basically when you open up the bag, you'll see two D sizes and shape and color of kibble. Most of it is this one kind of triangle shape, a little lighter in color. And then some of it are these, you can see the zoom in here. It looks like what it's zoomed in on this kind of circular, darker colored thing. And what that is, is what blue Buffalo calls life source bits. Um, and but when you read between the lines, what it is is a, basically a multi VIT, a synthetic multivitamin mixed with the same ingredients that are being used to produce the light colored stuff, likely with some kind of coloring to make it feel different and stand out and have the, have you as a consumer go, oh, this is the life source bits. But functionally, it's just a multivitamin and the same ingredients that they're putting in the rest of the kibble. And it's produced just like you produce regular kibble. I can guarantee you that what takes place here in both the life source bits and in the, whatever, the ordinary part of the kibble mm-hmm <affirmative> is the same pro they're made through the same process, put the ingredient together, you squeeze 'em out through these little cutters to cut 'em into the right shape. And then you heat it up, dry it out. And you've got kibble. They're just making kind of two different kinds. And one of 'em, again, if you read between the lines, it's just like, okay, these are things that are packed with our, this is where the vitamin and nutrient contact comes from in the diet. Like I said earlier, every pet food that's sold under the like approval of AFCO that's complete, I balanced has to contain a certain amount of various micronutrients. And the vast majority of brands just take this. Like, there are a few different common multivitamin mixtures. They pop 'em into their recipe and they bake it into the kibble. And then all that's special about this is that number one, they've made a different, there's two different kinds of kibble in here. So it gives you the feeling of, oh, we added this cool thing to it. And number two, it has this ridiculous name, life source Bits, trademark name, Trademark name. So nobody else can that, oh man, blue Buffalo got to life source bits before keto. Natural did gosh, how are we ever gonna compete this super lame mealy mouth, non word salad thing, like life source bits, just like, what is the source of life? Okay. VI VI. All right. Yeah. Great. Got it. Well, it's a very classic marketing trick of if you can't change something, add something. So again, I was 100% that person standing in the store, flipping bags, feeling like the sweat dripping down my I face of am I making the right choice for my dog of bringing home the right kibble for them. And when I see something like now that I'm educated, it's I can read into that and understand what that means. But when I see life source bits, it really feels this. Of course my dog needs this. I wanna make sure she's healthy. I wanna make sure I can extend her life when really what we're doing is we're interpreting all of this through the lens of science of it's just a ball of carbohydrates with synthetic vitamins. That's mixed in with this other kibble that is also prominently carbohydrates. So none of this has, Yeah, you got it. The very scientific it of being this really high pro high protein, which we haven't even talked about yet. They're calling out high protein. The let's look at the actual. Yeah, sure. Let's go to that. That's that? So the first point is that all this nature's evolutionary diet, the Wolf, the, the words ancestral, none of that means that this is the kind of diet that a Wolf feeds quite to the contrary. This is not at all the kind of diet that a Wolf feeds point number two is that this, the life source bits are really just the place that their vitamin mixture multivitamin mix comes from. And then the third is that there's deception. The use, and this use is like all over the product. Use of the, um, language, high protein or meat, rich, um, people, even if you're not a Wolf biologist, you've got a pretty reason. Most people walking around, if you ask 'em what is a Wolf eat? The vast majority of people say, well, at least the majority of what they eat is meat. They meat eat meat. We know wolves or carnivores. That's a thing. And so anything on this label that's designed to suggest that suggest that this stuff is packed with meat is gonna feel more consistent with what a Wolf, uh, actually eats. So what you see throughout the label are the Russians high protein and meat. Rich. Now what's notable about these is that both of those statements have no fixed definition. So under the regulatory environment, like regulatory framework, that pet food is sold in the us. There's not like a, in order to say high protein, it's gotta be more than this amount of protein in order to say meat rich, it's gotta be more than this amount of meat. It could be any amount whatsoever. So long as it's more than some other product made by that manufacturer. It's a relative statement. It's a relatives to exactly it's relative to their own products. So there are loads of pet food products. We make one that is much higher in pro that are much higher in protein than this one. They can still get away with saying high protein all over their bag. Cuz there is more protein in this product than in other blue Buffalo products relative to those products. This is high protein relative to those products. This is meat rich. That doesn't mean that a contains anything near as much protein or, or meat as a Wolf eats or two that it contains anywhere as much protein or meat as plenty of other pet foods that are being sold. It just means it's more than other blue Buffalo products. And AFCO sets a very minimal level, right? Where there has to have at least a certain amount of protein. What is that protein percentage compared to this crude protein percentage? We're looking at the, at the guaranteed analysis panel, which is at the back of every pet food. So you can flip over your own bag and look at that too. Yeah. So people should go try to find our episode on protein content and pet food And do these dive on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, it's just like it. It'll tell you what the minimum amount that AFCO requires. Every pet food brand to put in there, it'll tell you, we go into the science of how much wolves typically eat, how much dogs, if left to their own devices will eat and all that. But a few take home points about this product. Like you said, Jen, on the G the guaranteed analysis panel is basically where the numbers are. That is for my money. If you want, wanna be a smart shopper about pet food, just go straight there. That's what you want to go to. Cuz that's the stuff where there's actual science around the benefits or costs of using it. There's like your dogs, none of the science that's meaningful, that's being done these days is framed in terms of products or ingredients. It's all about nutrients. You know, like products are eight up of ingredients and ingredients are made up of nutrients, protein, fat carbohydrate, MI, uh, vitamins, minerals, et cetera. And that stuff. Those are the real conceptual building blocks around, which all of nutritional science is based. And so that's where you need to go. If you want to understand what the science says about a product is like, look at the numbers on the actual nutrient panel, not even the ingredients, the nutrients, and that's what the guaranteed analysis panel is. You can see at this product here, 34% protein on an as fed basis. So two thirds of every one of these kibbles is something other than protein. If to you that qualifies as high protein, then fine. That's why, you know, there will be some one out of every 100 viewers or whatever that listens to this is gonna say yes, that to me feels very high. But the vast majority of us here, it's only a third of the product, two thirds of the, this completely D his other stuff, his carbohydrate, his moisture is indigestible stuff like fiber. And so that's why in any kind of like in a, in a real market where the consumer was being protected by the regulators, there would be a threshold across which you'd have to go in order to call your product high protein. But because there isn't in the pet food world, you get products like this that, uh, you get all kinds of language and imagery meant to suggest, oh, the, the vast majority of this is meat. When in reality, it's nothing like That. Right. And I think that, that was something I was thinking about when you were saying that is, oh, that number feels so high 34% and it's not necessarily meat protein. Right, right. That's the, there's a lot of, I'm sure there's some of these ingredients that provide some of the other protein percentages. Yeah, That's right. E even, you know, some plant material, um, include most plants are made up primarily of carbohydrate, but do contain protein as well. So if you use enough plants, ingredients, if it makes up enough of your formula, it'll supply a meaningful amount of protein. But also in this hyper modernized food science environment, food engineers can take, start with something like an ear of corn and turn that ear of corn into 10 different synthetic products that provide either pro it's like a protein mixture or it's high fructose corn syrup, or one of a dozen different things you could break it out to. And so there's that same concept is used to turn something like a potato into something like potato protein, just something that's very commonly used in pet food products, P protein, potato protein plant. Yeah. I See protein a product there's yeah. De Alfa meal. I it's, it is just so fascinating to me because yes, I was absolutely that person that would take it as, you know, verbatim of oh, 34%. They 34% of chicken when really that's not it at all. No. Yeah. There's no, you would have to base in order for like chicken. It depends what part of the animal you're using. If you want to think about what percentage is fat versus protein, but in order for you to get like 34%, a number is low as 34%, you'd have to be feeding like the skin primarily where it's like, there's a lot of fat there, but all the like cuts of meat, something like chicken breast is north of 60% protein. It's vast majority of it is protein. And so you can get a sense that like, oh, okay. If there was, if this was really a product that was just composed of like chicken breast, this number would be much higher in reality that a lot of thought goes into how a, a brand like this structures, their ingredient list in order to give the consumer the impression that the vast majority of it is one thing. When in reality, it's all spread across all these different ingredients, you know, just because chicken is the first ingredient here. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> doesn't mean that in the aggregate, the chicken and animal ingredients make up more than the plant ingredients, because you have dozens and dozens of ingredients on this list. And they're listed in descending order of like pre evidence commonality, like on an individual ingredient basis. Chicken is the most common ingredient in this product. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know, that that's first on this ingredient list, but if you look at, if you identify all of the different plant ingredients and add them all together, versus all of the different animal ingredients and add all of them together, you will see that the at material makes up by far the majority of the product. Fascinating. It just blows my mind. <laugh> and yeah, I, I think also going back to those guaranteed analysis, let's do some quick math on, we mentioned carbohydrate content earlier of this is a prominently high carb relat lower, you know, it's not high protein in terms of, we walk through why that is of how let's do some quick math. How do people calculate? Okay, we see the pro protein, but manufacturers are not required to call out carbohydrate percentages. How do we calculate how much carbs are in this food? Yep, exactly. So, so again, car, uh, my manufacturers are not gonna tell you how much carbohydrate is in there. And so if you want to figure that out for yourself, you, you got a few different strategies. One is the simplest way. If you've got a, a manufacturer who's willing to shoot straight with you, is you just ask, 'em directly reach out to blue Buffalo customer service and ask them how much digestible carbohydrate is in this product. Um, and that may tell you, or they may not. Otherwise what you have to do is you can kind of back into a good estimate based on what is on the label. What's in the guaranteed analysis panel. And we could probably do a whole show about this method, but I'll just summarize really quickly. You start off with 100% of the product, and then you subtract everything. That's not carbohydrate. And then what you're left with is a reasonably good guess about how much carbohydrate. So in this case, or in all cases, you're talking about six different things that make up the vast majority of the nutritional content of any pet food, product, protein, fat, carbohydrate, digestible carbohydrate, all of which contain calories. And then three things that don't contain any calories, fiber, which is a kind of carbohydrate, but it's not digestible. It just passes through the animal without ever being broken down and entering the bloodstream just goes through it Ash, which is like a FA it's not cigarette Ash or like something that's burned out. It's a term of art in pet food that basically stands for like bone material, like micronutrient content, bone material is just, again, we could do a whole show on this, but like, that's what it simply is. And then water protein, fat carbohydrate can in calories, fiber Ash, water do not. And so if you want to get to just how much carbohydrate is in there, my hand getting my, uh, ability to do this tested, um, start with a hundred and subtract out the other five things. And most brands will, they're required to tell you four of 'em and you can make some good inferences of about the fifth. You can always make some reasonably good inferences about the amount of carbohydrate. So if you start with 100 subtract out protein and fat first in this case, that's 34% and 15%. So you get that that's 49%. So you're left with there's 51% of the product remaining for fiber Ash, moisture and carbohydrate. Uh, the fiber is 6% and the moisture is 10%. So now we're up to 65% of the product. So 35% of this product by weight is carbohydrate and Ash, the Ash content isn't listed here either because Ash has kind of a bad connotation and you're not required as a pet food brand to disclose it. So again, blue, Buffalo, doesn't, um, it's somewhere in almost all brands between like two and 10%. And so what you've got, that's why I say the best you can do is like a reasonable estimate of the amount of carbohydrate that's in here is like pick your favorite number for Ash added on. And what you're left with is the carbohydrate content. So in this case, you're talking about something around 30% carbohydrate. So it's got roughly the same amount of protein and carbohydrate, uh, in this product. So you could just, as <laugh>, if blue Buffalo thinks that 35% protein means high protein and meat rich, it could just as easily be saying high carbohydrate, oatmeal, rich, or high carbohydrate vegetable rich, because those, the amount of carbohydrate's about the same as the amount of protein, obviously they wanna underscore the, uh, amount of protein, but that's, that's generally the method we could do a whole show on like getting to the, the, the kind of like specific answers of that question. I feel like the more that as we've really had this conversation, it's went from a marketing spin of like a big fat chicken breast sitting on a plate for your dog to now that we've really broken down all the ingredients. It's almost like chicken sandwich through two, between two thick slices of bread with a lot of vegetables on it. Yeah. And then it's really kind of making this seem a different framing. So now that you know, really how to look at ingredients, look at your guaranteed analysis and break down and break through all these marketing claims and trademarks and all of that, of how they're learning, how they're learning new customers, how they're framing in a very interesting and fascinating way, their ingredients. So it's not a big chicken breast on a plate, sorry to say, well, wolves are not making stirring up a pot of oats, um, in the back. And it's not an evolutionary diet. So this was, I don't know, it's a really good, interesting, uh, breakdown of everything <laugh> So we got two more of this, so, right. So we've covered three things. One is the bad language or the, the misleading language around evolutionary diet wolves. Second is the high protein meat rich thing, which is relative term, not an absolute one. Mm-hmm <affirmative> third is the life source bits, whatever that ridiculous thing is. The fourth is something that you coined a perfect phrase for earlier, which is the health halo words. There are some words that are used and blue Buffalo is like the chief, the prime offender around this, in the pet food world. Right now, these are words. That mean nothing. They have no definition and any brands could use them just as accurately as the next. They have no actual definition in the world of pet food regulation, but they feel good when it comes to making a good traditional choice. So let me give you a few of them. Healthy, holistic, wholesome high quality, um, Right there on the front of the bag. What? Holistic? Yeah. Oh yeah. Healthy. Holistic. Yep. Yeah. It's all of these things. Again, any brand could use these words as much as blue Buffalo, can they have no definition, which means that nobody can use them in a, in a way that's, uh, misleading enough that the regulators say, uh, uh, this is not healthy. If you see these kinds of words on a pet food label, your challenge, what you should be thinking about is I need to try my best to ignore this stuff. I need to think, try to put myself in a world where those words just aren't on the bag, cuz they mean nothing. And they sh you shouldn't let them influence your thinking about whether or not this is a, a good fit for your dog or not. Cuz really they're just like you said before health halo words, they give you a warm, fuzzy, I'm making a good choice, but really have no meaning. Like I said, any brand, apple, Acme, dog food, the cheapest stuff you can get could use these same exact words to the same extent that blue Buffalo can. So they don't mean anything. Such A good Tip. Don't rely on 'em. Yeah. Such a good tip. Mm-hmm <affirmative> I'm sorry. I like move quickly. I, I, is there anything else you wanna say about that? I got one more that I want to get. No, Absolutely. Let's let's round it out. So this one's super interesting. This is the fifth one, if you, so the, the bag that I bought from the store is not the same as the bag that you've pulled up on the website. Uh, let me see if I can make this work. It looks really similar. Oh, good for you. But one thing that's different is that on your bag under this nature's evolutionary diet tagline, it says with wholesome grains mm-hmm <affirmative> can you like zoom in? I don't know if you're able to zoom, but if that that's something that's on, on your bag and it's not on my bag and you can see it again in this, uh, this little popup on the side of the screen here where the star rating is, right chicken with grains recipe. So this is really notable because blue Buffalo as a company was really the, the, the force that brought grain-free diets into the world of pet food. There's like my, my position on grain-free diets is super simple. Whether your carbohydrates come from grains or from something else like potatoes, it doesn't matter. It's the about the amount of carbohydrate in there that that's what matters. So there's nothing inherently better about grain-free all it means is it, their carbs are coming from potatoes, sweet potatoes, something like that. That's a big source of starch, but it's not corn wheat rice basically. And so there's nothing inherently better about it. But what's interesting is that like blue Buffalo, that was their brand. They leaned so heavily into no Dan's wrong. Grains are bad thing and we've got a good alternative to it. And now you've got them advocating, putting on their label, oh, with wholesome grains, chicken with grains recipe. And so the two most notable things about this are number one. I hope this goes without saying, but at this point, everyone should understand wolves, eat any grains. Grains are not a product that an animal like a Wolf or a dog can even pull nutrition out of unless it's cooked. So obviously wolves don't cook any of their food. They're not able to digest grains effectively unless they're, if they came across like a field of corn, a Wolf is not going in there and eating a bunch of raw corn and leaving full. It can't do that effectively with its digestive infrastructure, You and dogs. I think that's gonna be an important note here of you're speaking about wolves as in an evolutionary perspective, but that still holds true. That's right in today's dogs. That's right. If you don't cook that stuff down, you can't just feed your dog a stock of wheat and it's gonna pull the nutrition. It needs out of that. You've gotta cook it down. And so obviously a diet that features wholesome grains and note the, the health halo word used in there. It's not just with grains, um, is not something that's gonna be very evolutionarily consistent. But the second thing that's notable about it is like, wait a, it, these are the same guys that used to say grains are the devil. Now they're making a product and loudly saying there's grains in there. And the reason for that, this is a recent change. And the change was motivated by the, and we don't have enough time to do this today, but of the scandal over the disease, dilated cardiomyopathy in dogs. There's this cluster of veterinarians who work for Hills pet nutrition, who basically created this scandal around the idea that grain free pet foods might be this heart disease. And so everybody should be worried about whether they're feeding green, free pet foods, cuz they might give their dog a heart disease it's nonsense. And in plenty of other places on the internet, you can have, I've explained it in all kinds of detail. But for the purposes of this show, we can't do that. It's just not enough time. But it spices to say just like blue Buffalo, rather than having a consistent developmental philosophy rather than pushing back against the claims made by these folks just said like, oh, turns out now grains are being made to be a good thing that like, uh, these folks are pushing the idea that grains need to be in there in order to prevent a heart disease. Let's make our product completely different about let's like abandon thing that we said was good and now we're gonna, uh, no, no, we do it this way now, which is just absurd. Obviously. It's like, you know, they're blue, Buffalo doesn't do a podcast like, like ours jet, you know what I mean? Like it's just an example of how like they don't go on the record with what they care about, what they stand for, what kind of products they're trying to make. They're just like being blow own around by the winds of like news and misinformation and whatever, and just rolling out new products to meet whatever the kind of days news puts out there. So I was, I think that's kind of a particularly ridiculous thing. Yeah. It, it is a very interesting adaptation for like consumer interest of, oh, we have to go, like you said, kind of blow with the winds of change of put wholesome grains, underline it, really call it out. And yeah, it's, it's just fascinating really kind of going through all these claims of what they're calling out as, not what's not in there versus what's in there and how they're framing it for the consumer. So I do love your tip of flip over the bag, focus in on, uh, focusing on the numbers, focus in on the science. Is there any other tips that you can think of for consumers when they are shopping and want to make sure they do make the right choice? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, uh, you know, it's look at the numbers on the nutrient side and particularly maximize protein intake and minimized carbohydrate intake, um, is a key thing for me. Second for me is look how open and fair and straight shooting and honest the brand is not, there are lots of, unfortunately there are a lot of brands these days that actually use the word honest to connote. Like you should trust us. We're the one that's really the honest one. But look for, instead of just, that's not the kind of thing that you just read a word and then assume that that's a, a fairly applied one. It's like something where you have to go look for. Yeah. Whether they're giving you indications that they're in fact honest, it always blows my mind that there are no other brands that do this kind of thing. There aren't like other pet food CEOs with their own podcasts where they're making themselves available to the audience and answering questions and trying to defend what they do because it's indefensible frankly, in most cases. And so that's the other thing that I look for always is like degree of transparency, degree of look you in the eye fairness and not to put something away on a bag, but never address it directly in response to questions. And then of course the five things that we highlighted today. Yeah. One is the BS, evolutionary ancestral, Wolfie language. Two is the life source bits, whatever that is. Three is the high protein and meat rich kind of relative concept four is the health halo words, the meaningless words like wholesome and holistic and healthy that are just put on there to make you feel something. But in reality, they don't do anything. And then fifth is this ridiculous flip flop around the use of wholesome grains after they spent 15 years building a brand around the idea of the grains are bad for your dog. Um, Those are classes, great summary. Yeah. We, we hit so much in, we did it's 45 minutes and you know, I was thinking we were going through this. I know we're still kind of wrestling with the name, but I still do like this label BS and really kind of coming with a stamp as we keep us define debunk things too. Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's built on like, not so unfair assumption that like every brand we're gonna come across is primarily grounded in BS. It might not, you know, that's not entirely the case. There's nothing stopping brands from being really straightforward and being really Folsome in their disclosures and some do a better job than others. So that's my only hesitation around using that label because like if every buddy behaved like blue Buffalo, and it's not the case that most behave too differently, then we could call it that. But it's like, I also don't want to just indicate to folks that we're never gonna be able to say anything positive about The brands. Yeah. Well maybe we'll go with like a neutral label review or something where, because we do want to take a very scientific hierarch, like just really going through and having a framework of looking in the front, looking at the back, looking through the ingredients, really looking at that guaranteed analysis panel and we'll have the same framework for each brand. So we're not Sure. I mean, we Really tilted of, let's take this brand down and call out some label BS that they are doing. We do wanna take a very fair approach to each brand, whether we're picking it or our viewers bring one to us And we can even do, we could even do our own, you know, UN CEO, keto, natural pet foods. I'm happy at some point to bring our bag on the show and to address if viewers wanna submit it, listeners, wanna submit questions about or comments about our labeling or if they just want to give me cart blanche to explain what I see, I'm happy to do that as well. So we really are hoping that this turns into something of a discourse where if you got value out of this, pop us a note, reach out to us, let us know what brand you wanna see us do. Next, let us know about specific issues that you think we dealt with fairly or unfairly. Let us know what you think we should call this segment. Um, all that kind of stuff. And we'll be able to, uh, make the best show we can for you guys. I agree. Well, that's a wrap on the bloop Buffalo blue wilderness label review breakdown. <laugh> to be named nice job, but the so much great information. And like we said, we'll, we're willing to kind of take this where viewers want. So reach out to us in the show notes, we are more than interested to diving into other brands. We will be diving into other brands, stay tuned for other segments and we'll see you on the next episode. Okay. Bye her buddy. Bye Jen. All right, bye everybody.