How to choose your wet food and dry food for dogs and cats when you are not an expert in animal nutrition? Should we trust a Petfood score, or Petfood tables shared on Facebook?
Artificial intelligence at the service of Petfood
To date, the only way for consumers to learn about animal nutrition is to spend a lot of time on Facebook groups, which are often private, on forums, on articles which are often promotional offers. It has been more than 20 years that a large number of people, especially in the United States, who are often individuals without expertise in animal nutrition, copy content found on books, on sites, and develop their advice in animal nutrition .
The result, in 2023, is a set of remarks without any scientific basis, which often include conspiracy theories. Why trust one “influencer” over another? How to find elements of comparison, to verify their statements? Since 2015, Pacta ® Petfood has set up an animal nutrition observatory to determine the best strategy for offering quality information to the consumer.
Artificial intelligence is the solution for finding reliable and verifiable information, cross-checking information on hundreds, thousands of sites, and unmasking Fake News. This is why the Petfood Advisor ® project takes a long time, in the absence of funding. You too can contribute to our Petfood database by participating in Petfood Advisor ® groups and forums.
Pacta Petfood: Petfood Observatory
Since 2015, with Pacta ® Petfood, we have set up an international Petfood observatory to analyze the different scoring methods available to consumers, and compare the information shared on the Internet and social networks on animal nutrition. Our objective was to offer IT decision support tools for Petfood consumers, who above all need reliable and verifiable information.
This monitoring enabled us to identify the first scoring methods shared since at least 2007, which all had one thing in common: they are proposed by people who have no expertise in animal nutrition. For this reason, even today, consumers share comparative tables that are composed, especially since 2010, with information that no longer corresponds with current knowledge in this area.
Kibbles and carbohydrates
In particular, the articles on the subject of carbohydrates in kibble are made up of information taken from several sites, and which are no longer of much use today. Yet these articles continue to fuel numerous theories that may cause consumers to make decisions that are dangerous to the health of their animals.
In addition, it must be emphasized that the majority of techniques used by sites or Facebook groups to give opinions and rankings on brands of dry food or wet food are based on reading the labels. However, we do not find the percentage of carbohydrates on these packages, but above all, we do not know what the composition of these carbohydrates is. Thus, some will mix the concept of carbohydrates with that of white sugar, while the fibers, recommended in the diets of diabetics, are precisely carbohydrates and do not pose any health problem.
Petfood labels that are not 100% reliable
There are therefore many kibble and wet food ranking tables, Petfood scores, articles with comparison tables, which are based on these labels. But the actual composition may be slightly different, and manufacturers sometimes have a few less delay before modifying labels after a composition change.
Here’s why we shouldn’t limit ourselves to reading these labels.
Moreover, when these articles explain to consumers how to establish their Petfood-Score, we see that it is sometimes necessary to estimate the humidity level, and sometimes even the ash level: we are far from a scientific and reliable classification. And going back to this problem of carbohydrates, we find in these tables simple estimates, which is very different from the determination of carbohydrates in the laboratory.
We therefore have an accumulation of inaccurate data and sometimes false information that can mislead consumers.
Development of Petfood-Score Pacta in 2023
It was important to remember the role of the Petfood-Score Pacta as we presented it on the Dog Food website in 2019.
As you can see, we are changing the structure of our sites for animal nutrition services. Our initial project is becoming more and more important, due to the increase in fake news that is increasingly shared on social networks.
In particular, the Petfood Score will now be presented on dedicated sites. Since the attacks suffered during our second presentation of the concept in 2019, the illicit use of our concept has led us to strengthen our information mission.
Old articles will be gradually put back online.
We have posted multiple media on the Internet and social networks in order to allow you to have information from several sources. Indeed, the information you need may be on a site that you will not have found with your online searches.
Websites, discussion groups, Facebook groups, Youtube channels, we proceed to the referencing of these media so that the Internet user who has the information you are looking for at the moment is able to share it with you.
The summary work will be done on the Petfood Advisor ® site.