Tigertail Foods is a wholistic pet food and treat company. We use only human-grade
ingredients that come
from trusted sources.
Your pet's health is our first
concern and everything we make is motivated by
the principle
that healthy food helps make healthy pets.
Health Matters
September 1, 2009
Welcome to the premier edition of Health Matters, the feature where we will discuss issues of, well, health matters! In this edition Ann, Tigertail Foods' co-founder, explains exactly what makes Tigertail Foods' the best food products available to pets.
While we will offer our opinions about how to best achieve optimum health for our animals, we do NOT profess to know what is better for your pet than you or your vet do! Always consult with your vet, then consult with another vet and get a second opinion (because we also believe in having options!).
What Makes Tigertail Foods So Special?
What makes Tigertail Foods pet food different from other premium food?
I could and probably will write a book on this topic one day, but for now we’ll try the Cliff Notes version. First the ingredients, second the source of the ingredients, third the formulas, fourth the small batches made and packed by human hands who care, fifth the time factor involved in making and getting it to market, and sixth the honesty factor.
1. Ingredients: Our ingredients are the best! We use real beef hamburger, beef heart, and beef liver. Our chicken is real bone-in thigh meat and chicken liver. The ground turkey we use is available in almost every market in California and probably nation-wide. We use Chicken of the Sea chunk light tuna. Our vegetables and fruits are as locally grown as possible so that they arrive fresh and whole at Tigertail Foods, where we steam and grind them ourselves. With the exception of the beef and chicken liver, you could easily find all of our ingredients in almost any family kitchen in this country.
How is this different from other companies’ products? Look at their labels. Do they say meat? Meat is NOT beef. Meat is any animal flesh: skunk, squirrel, goat, road kill, buzzard, snake, dog, cat, horse to mention a few possibilities. If they don’t call it by name, they’re not proud of the meat source. If they don’t call it beef, it isn’t. Downer cattle can’t go into our food but they can certainly put it into pet food. Do they say chicken or turkey or do they say poultry? Poultry is a nebulous term that can be almost any bird, including buzzard, seagull, and pigeon. These animals are not farmed, they are found dead somewhere. Fish not intended for human consumption must (by law!) be preserved with ethoxyquine. Ethoxyquin has been banned from human food because of its known link as a carcinogenic agent. So where does the fish come from in cat and dog food? Who knows? If the label only says fish we have no way of knowing what fish and how it was preserved but you can bet your morning doughnut on the fact that if it were of human quality, it would be in human food and not for pets. If you think about the parts of a fish that you don’t eat, remember our global economy and the fact that somewhere someone will eat and enjoy that part. So what’s left? The guts? Maybe the gills? All we know is that it didn’t come from any part that we would want on our plate. But the vegetables, grain, and fruit are okay, right? Maybe, maybe not. Does their label say “something pumice?” Pumice means floor sweepings. Basically it is the fine particles left over from some other processing of that fruit or vegetable. Do they have brewers rice/yeast on the label? It sounds good but it is the leftovers from the distilling process and has almost no nutrients left. One company lists peanut hulls as a major ingredient. Hulls are the fibrous shells around the peanut, and we would starve to death trying to live on them, yet they proudly market their product with no apologies to our dogs. Fruit isn’t cheap to grow so anything that we can eat will find itself into our food chain in some way. Anything left over from processing will be identified as whatever it once was and sold to pet food companies. So, while the label says apples and our mind’s eye sees a red delicious on a plate, maybe you should be thinking about old, shriveled apple bits, stems, cores, and skins.
2. Source: We buy as locally as possible, and always of USA origin. One of the reasons why we buy fresh, whole fruit and vegetables is because almost everything canned comes from somewhere else. There are only two US nation-wide companies that I know of that make unsweetened applesauce. As I’ve watched the production of our own food move off-shore, I’ve been forced to go back along the supply chain to the basic level of fresh. Sometimes this means that we won’t have fresh pumpkin or cranberry because they are seasonal. Luckily, there are US companies that still can deliver pumpkin and dry cranberries.
Our local meat supplier delivers daily to the best markets and restaurants in San Diego and Southern California. While he has many sources at his disposal, we buy only US products from him. The beef comes from the Midwest, home of some of the finest cattle in the country. We will not use any meat from third world countries where sanitary or slaughtering practices are questionable. We will not use beef from Chile because their cattle are fattened on fish which has been preserved with ethoxyquine. Do you know where your meat comes from? You should check!
3. Formulas: Our pet food formulae are truly designed to promote health. Believe it or not, there are stories of pet food manufacturers knowingly selling foods that may contribute to either an illness or condition, for which they also make a curative diet. Do you believe in greed? I do. I’m greedy for healthier, happier, longer-living pets to have with me for the rest of my life. My animals eat our dog and cat food. They are my furchildren and I would never feed them dreck. All of our formulae are fully balances to provide the best nutrition possible. The goal of BARF feeders is balance over time; we produce balance every time.
Our foods begin with human quality animal protein, resulting in a protein “rich” food that’s easy to digest. Protein is the building block we all need to grow and thrive. We believe in feeding what Mother Nature designed the animal to eat. Cats are obligate carnivores so their food is almost entirely animal protein (~96%) with some fat. Dogs are carnivores capable of digesting some carbohydrates so we add in a small amount rice and oatmeal (~6-8%) into two of our formulae. For those animals with total grain intolerance we make a grain free dog food. The vegetables are steamed and pulped for fast and easy absorption by their bodies. The meat content of our dog foods range from ~85 to 86%. We have tried to provide cats with a better “mouse” and dogs with a better “rabbit.” Because not everyone is comfortable feeding bones, we grind up chicken thigh bones into our food to balance the calcium with the phosphorus content.
Because we don’t know the end-user of our food, we adopted the philosophy that less is more. We do not add in supplements to our dog food. We think you should get what you need from your food, and the excellent quality of our foods should give your pets everything they need to thrive. However, if you wish to add a multivitamin or other nutritional supplement, you need not worry that your dog is being over-medicated. Just recently a San Diego newspaper ran an article about the lack of quality in several supplements and several dog food manufacturers overstating the quantity of supplements in their foods. Specifically the paper mentioned that glucosamine and chondroitin listed on bags of kibble were either of very low quality or so low in quantity that they would do nothing for your pets. Why bother you ask. Marketing, and perception is often far more important in selling than reality. The pictures on the dog food bags show glowing fruits, vegetables, gorgeous cuts of meat. The reality of that “meat and potatoes” flavored food is that the meat was probably rancid before being literally cooked to death and the potatoes were unfit for human consumption and likely moldy. Not exactly the picture on the bag. Hail Madison Avenue!!
4. Small Batches: We make our food in small batches of less than 100 pounds. It is mixed with humans holding the mixer and watching the process. It is packed by hand and each package is weighed by employees who look for quality and consistency. We are definitely a “hands-on” company. People tell me that I could make a lot more if I turned the entire process over to a large manufacturing company. They are probably right, but I would lose all quality control, and I’ve seen more than one promising company dwindle out of sight because they lost control of the manufacturing process and the actual maker increased his profit margin by cheapening the ingredients even further. If this sounds familiar, think China and melamine as a substitute form of protein.
5. Freshness: We make our food two or three days a week. We don’t want it sitting around in our freezers any longer than it takes to freeze. When asked by a store owner why our food smelled so good, I was at a loss until I realized that our production to market time line is probably the shortest in the business. I buy and pick up our meat, vegetable, fruit, and grain supplies every week, we make what we need for customers every week, and I deliver to the stores or ship to customers almost every day. Our meat doesn’t sit in a cold-storage warehouse for months, waiting to be pulled and eventually made into pet food. It is conceivable that a customer could buy dog food from us that two days prior was arriving in a local distribution center. Pretty nifty turn around time. And your pets benefit from that freshness.
6. Honesty: We will never knowingly lie to our customers. It’s as simple as that. When we have discovered a misstatement, we have gone back and corrected the information. It hasn’t happened often, but we’re not infallible. We work with suppliers that we trust, but we don’t have 7/24 cameras on them and their employees. Business is run on a measure of faith based on past performance.
All these things make Tigertail Foods different from our competitors. Are there good foods out there in the marketplace? I certainly hope so, but I don’t know what other companies do, what their sources are, how long their products have been sitting around waiting to be sold, and all the other questions caring pet parents should have answered before they entrust their pet’s health and spend their hard-earned money on any pet food. We’re proud of our products and stand behind our brand name. Our business has grown mostly by word of mouth… the type of advertisement that money can't buy.
