The mission
Most pet owners want to feed their dogs and cats well, and most have no reliable way to evaluate whether a given food is actually any good. The existing landscape is a mess: brand marketing dressed up as nutrition advice, sponsored review sites, vet recommendations that vary wildly from clinic to clinic, and pet-owner forums full of strongly-held opinions that contradict each other. Meanwhile, the information that would actually answer the question — what's in the bag, and what does that mean — sits buried in ingredient panels that most people don't know how to read.
KibbleIQ exists to close that gap. The goal is to be the place pet owners can go to get an objective, rubric-based analysis of what's in their pet's food — same criteria applied to every brand, no pay-for-placement, no surprises.
Why the site exists
The pet food industry is huge, the marketing budgets are larger, and the gap between what the packaging says and what's actually inside is often significant. A bag can read "natural" while listing artificial preservatives. A brand can describe itself as "vet recommended" while the top five ingredients are corn, wheat, and by-product meal. "Premium" means whatever the marketing team decides it means.
The analyzer cuts through that. Paste an ingredient list — or search a brand — and get the same rubric applied every time. Score, grade, what the formula does well, what it does poorly, and how it compares to alternatives. No ranked sponsored picks. No "editor's choice" badges sold by the highest bidder. Just the ingredient list, evaluated against published nutrition science, the same way for every brand.
Our editorial standards
These are the rules we hold ourselves to. If we ever break one, we'll update this page and explain why.
- No paid brand placements, ever. A brand cannot buy a higher score, a better placement on a guide, or a more favorable review. We don't offer paid promotion as a service, and we don't accept it if offered.
- No sponsored content. No brand-written articles, partner content or advertorials. No brand pays for, writes or approves anything we publish.
- No free products accepted for review. We don't take free bags from brands, ever. Every product we review is evaluated against the publicly available ingredient list as printed on the bag or the manufacturer's website.
- Affiliate disclosure. Some outbound links on KibbleIQ — particularly "Shop on Amazon" buttons in our buying guides — are affiliate links. If you purchase through those links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This supports the site but does not, and will not, influence which brands we recommend, how we score them, or where they rank. Our editorial decisions are made before any commercial relationship is considered.
- Consistent scoring. Every score comes from the published ingredient list run through the same rubric. The analyzer uses an AI model at temperature 0, which keeps results consistent but can't guarantee identical output, so we publish one fixed score per product, and when a score changes, the page shows a dated "Corrected" note.
How the site works
KibbleIQ runs on an AI-powered ingredient analyzer. When you paste an ingredient list or search for a brand, the analyzer applies our scoring rubric and returns a grade, a score, and a breakdown of what's in the food. The analyzer is built on Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, and is configured to run at temperature 0, which keeps results consistent.
Under the hood, we maintain a curated database of verified ingredient lists. When a brand is in our database, the analyzer runs against the ingredient list we've recorded, mostly from the manufacturer's own website and for a few products from a major retailer's listing. For brands not yet in the database, the analyzer falls back to what the model knows about that brand's typical formula. Over time, we expand coverage and verify more products directly.
Our full methodology page goes deeper on the rubric, the grade scale, the database, and the limits of what our scoring does and does not evaluate.
How we use AI
KibbleIQ uses AI in two places. Scoring: the analyzer sends each ingredient list, with our published rubric, to Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Writing: our articles (reviews, comparisons, buying guides, ingredient explainers, food-safety Q&As and recall summaries) were drafted by Claude from the analyzer's output, our product database and public sources such as FDA recall notices and published studies. We published most of them in spring 2026, faster than one person could check line by line. A September 2026 audit found errors, including miscited studies and scores that no longer matched the analyzer. We are cutting the site back to the pages we can stand behind and correcting them. Each page says whether Adam has fact-checked it by hand, and when. A veterinarian has reviewed a page only if the page names them.
Who's behind KibbleIQ
KibbleIQ is run by one person, Adam Brush, who founded it in 2026. The idea came from combining three things he loves: animals, nutrition, and data. It started as a plan for a MyFitnessPal for dogs, and the free ingredient analyzer was built first. By day, Adam works in finance. He is not a veterinarian or a veterinary nutritionist; he decides what we publish, maintains the rubric, and handles corrections. Adam on LinkedIn
Contact
Questions, corrections, ingredient-list tips, media inquiries, or anything else: support@kibbleiq.com.
If you've spotted an error in a review — an ingredient list that looks outdated, a score that doesn't seem to match the rubric, a broken link — please let us know. Corrections are treated as high priority. Same for any reformulation we haven't caught yet. Our goal is for every published review to reflect the current formula, and reader tips are one of the best ways we find out when something has changed.
A note on what we're not
KibbleIQ is not a veterinary clinic, and no one on the site is a veterinarian. Our condition pages summarize what published veterinary sources say about diet. They do not give medication or dosing advice. A food's grade tells you something about the general quality of its ingredient list — it does not tell you whether that food is right for your specific pet. If your dog or cat has allergies, kidney disease, pancreatitis, weight management needs, breed-specific sensitivities, or any other condition that affects nutrition, please work with your vet. Our scoring is one input into a feeding decision, not the only one.