Dog Food Transparency

What dog food hides, data reveals

Some dog food manufacturers can be 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 there.

So we decided to analyse all the dog food available from the major British supermarkets and Amazon’s bestsellers, which came to 1,025 products in total.

After a lot of data cleaning and processing, we were able to reveal that 95% of products from the 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 the readers. What will help them understand the point? What will they engage with?

Paws.com was acquired shortly after this project, and their site is no longer live.

But I wanted to share the story with you as it was an interesting and ambitious project, especially on the data gathering side. And most importantly, what the data revealed.

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

K9 Magazine