FEDIAF

Key points

FEDIAF (the European Pet Food Industry Federation) issues the European nutritional guidelines for dogs and cats [1]. It is the European counterpart of the American AAFCO profiles — a reference point used in the production and complete-food declarations of commercial pet foods on the European market.

In BARFLAB we treat FEDIAF as an additional control point, not as the basis. The base remains NRC, described in a separate article [2].

Who FEDIAF was created for

The FEDIAF guidelines were written with complete commercial foods in mind — dry and wet — which the animal eats day after day as its only source of food. That is why they contain safety margins accounting for variability in production, storage and the lower digestibility of some nutrient forms in processed food [1].

FEDIAF is largely based on NRC data, but adapts it to the realities of the European pet food market [1] [2].

How to read it in BARFLAB

If a BARF diet does not meet FEDIAF, this is auxiliary information. It can show the difference between a fresh diet and the standard of commercial foods, but on its own it does not determine that the diet is wrong [1]. Some discrepancies result simply from the fact that FEDIAF assumes processed food with a different digestibility than raw meat.

What to remember

FEDIAF answers the question "would this look like a correct commercial food in Europe", not "is the body getting what it needs". We leave the first question to NRC.

Sources

1. FEDIAF. Nutritional Guidelines for Complete and Complementary Pet Food for Cats and Dogs. https://europeanpetfood.org/self-regulation/nutritional-guidelines/
2. National Research Council (2006). Nutrient Requirements of Dogs and Cats. National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/10668/nutrient-requirements-of-dogs-and-cats