The problem

Walk into any UK pet shop and you are confronted with hundreds of bags, tins and trays, every one of them labelled "complete", "natural" or "premium". None of those words is regulated in a way that helps you choose. "Complete" has a legal meaning (it meets the nutritional standards for a full diet), but it tells you nothing about the quality of the ingredients inside. "Natural" and "premium" are marketing terms with no statutory definition in pet food at all.

The ingredient list printed on the back is genuinely informative. UK law requires ingredients to be listed in descending order by weight, and it requires analytical constituents (protein, fat, fibre, ash, moisture) to be declared as percentages. But the ingredient list is written in a dialect most owners were never taught to read. Category names like "meat and animal derivatives" and "cereals" are legally permitted alternatives to naming the actual ingredients, and the percentages that would let you verify the recipe are only required for the headline ingredient.

The result is that two foods with wildly different recipes can print identical-looking labels, and an owner standing in an aisle has no practical way to tell them apart.

The moment it crystallised

In August 2026, Years, a UK fresh dog food subscription brand, issued a voluntary recall of all its meals after receiving 57 reports of dogs developing sudden bilateral dry eye. The company identified buckwheat as the likely cause, paused subscriptions for six weeks, and committed to reformulating with quinoa. The recall affected roughly 40,000 customers.

Trust in dog food was already fragile. That moment made it clear that dog owners needed better, more reliable ways to judge what they were feeding, independently of the brands themselves.

Around the same time, All About Dog Food, one of the UK's largest dog food ranking sites, published a statement about its ownership. It confirmed that the co-founder of Years had been a board member from January 2023 until May 2025. The statement was explicit that the site's ratings had never been influenced by the relationship, and there is no allegation that they were. But the connection had existed for more than two years without prominent disclosure, and because AADF's scoring methodology is not published, readers had no way to verify the reassurance for themselves.

What we built instead

Open Dog Food is the alternative: a ranking system where the data, the weights and the calculation are open by default, so anyone can reproduce a score and decide for themselves whether it makes sense.

The site currently covers 7,245 dog food products from 302 UK brands, sourced from manufacturer websites. Every product page shows the full ingredient breakdown, the feature values that fed into the score, and the exact model coefficients used. The ingredient glossary of over 1,100 entries is published. The scoring method and model weights are published, so any score can be reproduced from the data. Nobody adjusts scores by hand, and brands have no say in the outcome.

We reward transparency. A label that prints real percentages, names its meats and avoids vague fillers will score better than one that hides behind category names. That is the core of the approach.

What this site is not

This is not veterinary advice. The score is an interpretation of the declared recipe, not a clinical judgement. A food that scores 85 may be wrong for a dog with a specific allergy, a kidney condition or a sensitive stomach. If you have concerns about your dog's diet, speak to a qualified vet or a canine nutritionist.

The headline recipe score deliberately ignores price, brand reputation, packaging design and recall history. A recalled product's recipe score is the same as a non-recalled product with the same ingredients, because that score is about the recipe, not the manufacturing track record. Since September 2026, recall history has its own Safety score on every product page, shown alongside the recipe score rather than folded into it.

The site also does not rate complementary foods (single-ingredient minces, toppers, mixers) on the 1 to 100 scale, because that scale is designed for complete diets. Those products are shown with a "complementary" badge instead.

The disclosure

I work in the dog food industry, for a premium fresh dog food company. I want to be completely upfront about that, because transparency is the whole point of this site.

Open Dog Food is a personal hobby. It is not affiliated with my employer, not sponsored by any brand, and not influenced by anyone I work for. The algorithm does not know or care who makes a product; it only sees the ingredients printed on the label. Keeping the methodology, weights and data published is how I prove that. If the scoring method, the model coefficients and the ingredient data are all visible, there is nowhere for bias to hide.

What comes next

Over the following weeks we will publish a series of articles breaking down how the scoring actually works, what the ingredient list is legally allowed to hide, and how to read a dog food label with more confidence than the marketing intends you to have. The next article takes a single product, Bakers Meaty Meals Chicken, and walks through exactly why it scores 36 out of 100, step by step, using the real feature values stored on its product page.

Sources

  1. Years voluntary recall - https://www.years.com/pages/care (Wayback Machine archive, August 2026). 57 reports of sudden bilateral dry eye, buckwheat identified as likely cause, subscription pause for 6 weeks, reformulation with quinoa, approximately 40,000 customers affected. Covered on this site at /recalls/years-product-recall.

  2. A statement about All About Dog Food's ownership - https://www.allaboutdogfood.co.uk/articles/a-statement-about-all-about-dog-foods-ownership (20 August 2026, David Jackson). Confirms the co-founder of Years was an AADF board member from January 2023 until May 2025; states that ratings were never influenced by the relationship and that Years products were rated by the same algorithm as every other brand.

  3. FSA - Pet food guidance - https://www.food.gov.uk/business-guidance/pet-food. UK Food Standards Agency. Confirms the FSA is responsible for animal feed legislation covering pet food manufacture in the UK.

  4. UK Pet Food - Understanding pet food labels (factsheet) - https://www.ukpetfood.org/resource/labelling-factsheet.html. UK Pet Food (formerly PFMA). Explains statutory requirements: ingredients in descending order by weight, category names permitted, analytical constituents required, percentages required only for headline ingredients.

  5. Open Dog Food database - live database powering opendogfood.com (queried September 2026). 7,245 publicly listed dog food products (4,022 complete, 3,223 complementary) across 302 UK brands. Counts reflect public-site filters: UK brands only, dog species only, no variety packs or multipacks.

  6. Open Dog Food methodology page - https://www.opendogfood.com/methodology. Documents the five-step pipeline, published model coefficients, and ingredient glossary statistics. The source code itself is not open source, but the method, weights and data are published so any score can be reproduced.