Dog Food Transparency

What dog food hides, the data reveals

Some dog food manufacturers are deliberately vague about what’s in their product, listing items like cereals, oils, and meat derivatives. But which cereals? Which oils? And what even are meat derivatives?

Paws.com was created to address this problem. The company was passionate about creating transparency in dog food, and they wanted to create content to get their message out to the world.

So we decided to analyse all the dog food available on the shelves of British supermarkets including the bestsellers on Amazon. This came to a total 1,025 products.

After a lot of data cleaning and processing, we were able to reveal that 95% of products from major dog food brands contained unspecified ingredients.

We visualised the data on the client’s site, but it was actually this simpler accompanying graphic that was most commonly featured in the media coverage.

It’s always worth considering what will be most useful to readers, and what will help them understand the point. What will they actually engage with?

This was quite an ambitious project, especially on the data gathering side, and most importantly, for what the data revealed.

“New report has cast significant doubt on the quality of information provided to pet owners”

K9 Magazine