Fresh Thinking: The Science, Standards, and Clinical Potential of Fresh Food

This episode is sponsored by The Farmer’s Dog.

Clients are increasingly asking their veterinarians about fresh dog food, and many of the questions stem from misconceptions, starting with the assumption that fresh and raw diets are the same thing.

In this episode of The Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360, Brandon Stapleton, DVM, head veterinarian and vice president of animal healthcare at The Farmer’s Dog, joins host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, to explain what fresh food is and isn’t, what digestibility and “human grade” mean, how individually portioned meals can help with weight management, and how highly palatable food can help senior, cancer, and postoperative patients keep eating.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: We hear this term a lot: human grade. What does human grade actually mean, and how does it shape The Farmer’s Dog’s ingredients and production standards?

Brandon Stapleton, DVM: The first thing is, human grade is not a buzzword; it’s a regulated term. And human grade also can’t be applied to part of the food. So either the whole food, from ingredients to manufacturing, et cetera, is human grade, or it’s not. It’s a binary proposition. What human grade means is you have to adhere to human food safety and allergy control standards, like from the side of cross contamination, and we’ve been that from day one. Will always be that. It’s really central to our ethos. It’s not easy to do. It’s a lot of work, and a big team that makes sure we meet those standards. But we’re religious about those standards.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: How do you make fresh food complete and balanced, and what does that look like from your perspective?

Brandon Stapleton, DVM: I’ll start with the people that do that. We’re one of the biggest employers of board-certified pet nutritionists in pet food, on top of a bunch of amazing PhD nutritionists that we also have. That is the group that does it. The process to make a food both complete and balanced is really the same across pet food. But our team is so gifted in the expertise that they bring to the table, both in making the food and the research, that I really would point to them as the chief experts. It’d be impossible to do as much as we do without them.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: You hit a big word in our community: research. We’re looking at evidence-based medicine and feeding trials. How are you continuing to build that evidence?

Brandon Stapleton, DVM: We’ve done all the things you could imagine from the AAFCO feeding trials, but we know those only go 6 months, which often isn’t enough time to see nutritional changes. So we’ve done a 6-plus-year at-home feeding study. We’ve got a long-term clinical study that published the wave one results before. We’ve got more coming on that. On the research side, we’ve got a few more locked and loaded right now that I can’t quite talk about yet. And then that’s outside of digestibility, our palatability studies, our RSS studies—all the things that you want to have access to to know about a food. We have that available on our vet portal for anybody to see. We’re very transparent with those results.