Your Pet's Food Bag, Decoded: A Pet Parent's Guide to Reading Labels and Ingredients

Most of us have stood in the pet food aisle, flipped a bag over with every intention of making an informed decision, and left more confused than when we started. The ingredient list is long and most of it is words you cannot pronounce. According to a 2025 survey, 58% of pet owners believe pet food labels are misleading¹ — and a separate study found that 79% of consumers feel the same way about pet product advertising overall.² The good news is that once you know what to look for, a label actually tells you quite a lot.

The Ingredient List: Where to Begin

Look for a clearly named whole protein like "deboned chicken" or "wild-caught salmon" as the first ingredient. Vague terms like "meat protein," "animal digest," or "meat meal" are red flags — if a brand cannot name the animal, that is worth noting. And avoiding.

Also watch for ingredient splitting — when one ingredient gets broken into multiple similar entries to make each look smaller. A rice-heavy formula might list "ground rice" and "rice flour" separately, for example. Combined, they could easily outweigh the meat or whole vegetables, even if those appear first. Always look at the first five ingredients together, not just the first one.³

What to Look for When It Comes to Sourcing

Sourcing is one of the easiest things for a brand to be vague about on a label — and one of the most important things to pay attention to.

If a label just says "beef" or "chicken" with no additional context, there's no way to know how that animal was raised or what it was fed. The same goes for plant-based proteins — generic terms like "vegetable protein" or "plant protein concentrate" don't tell you much about quality or sourcing either. The more specific the label, the more transparent the brand.3

Look for callouts like grass-fed, wild-caught, free-range, non-GMO, and a clearly named country of origin — but make sure those claims are backed up in the actual ingredient list, not just splashed on the front of the bag. Marketing language on the packaging doesn't always match what's inside.⁴ Responsibly sourced ingredients cost more to produce, which is why not every brand prioritizes them — but the quality of the protein directly affects the nutrition your pet actually gets from it. It's worth knowing the difference.

At Halo, sourcing is something we take seriously — which is why every recipe is made with whole vegetables, grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, and free-range chicken, all non-GMO and made in the USA.