Art on the theme of animal feed and pet food
The system under which new ingredients for animal feed, including pet food, are reviewed for safety in the United States is muddled following the breakup last year of an unusual partnership of federal regulators with a private organization.
That partnership, between the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO), expired on Oct. 1 after the FDA opted not to renew the agreement but instead to handle reviews on its own through a new process. The federal agency, by law, is in charge of regulating food safety for people and other animals. AAFCO's role is by custom and not explicitly authorized by law.
Not to be sidelined, AAFCO asserts that it remains an important standard setter that can guide state, federal and international regulators with ingredient definitions and feed labeling standards. Last month, it approved a proposal that Kansas State University's Olathe Innovation Campus fill the role served by the FDA under the previous arrangement: providing scientific review of applications on new animal food ingredients.
AAFCO Executive Director Austin Therrell suggested that Kansas State would do a better job at it than the FDA: "AAFCO's partnership with K-State Olathe begins a new era of innovation and proficiency for the animal feed industry," he said in a written announcement. "This new pathway will offer a regulatory review process that is straightforward and comprehensive to bring ingredients to market safely and more efficiently than our previous process with FDA."
For its part, the FDA said nothing, having been silenced by the Trump administration, which was installed on Jan. 20.
A request by the VIN News Service for comment from the FDA last week elicited an email response that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services "has issued a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health. This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization." The message gave no end date for the pause.
The directive to federal officials to cease public appearances played out dramatically at a Jan. 21-23 meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas, where AAFCO members approved the Kansas State partnership and conducted other business.
Susan Thixton, founder of a consumer advocacy group called Truth About Pet Food and a one-time AAFCO adviser, was watching the meeting online when three participants from the FDA left midstream. "They made the announcement that the new administration has prohibited them from discussing any future regulations with the public, and they picked up their stuff, and they walked out of the meeting," she recounted. "It was a shocker."
As for the new, apparently rival, ingredient review processes, Thixton said: "It all feels like some sort of a power game that both AAFCO and FDA are playing. Is there going to be a loser in this game, and is that loser pet owners? ... We just don't know."
With the potential for changes to federal agencies under the new administration, she wondered further, "Is FDA's budget going to get cut? ... If the regulation of pet food gets cut on a federal level, millions of pet owners are going to freak out. There's just so many balls up in the air right now," she said.
How the partnership started and ended
The story of how a private organization with no legal regulatory authority became a mover and shaker in the animal feed industry dates back more than a century. Based in Illinois, AAFCO was established in 1909 with a goal of standardizing state regulations on feed. This was nearly 30 years before passage of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, a seminal law that gave rise to the modern FDA. AAFCO members are employees of state and other jurisdictional agencies that enforce regulations for animal feed, including pet food.
While its members are regulators, AAFCO is not. Still, its long history in the field gave it standing. The FDA acknowledged as much by serving as scientific reviewer of submissions to AAFCO's animal food ingredient definition process. This relationship was formalized in a memorandum of understanding put in place in 2007.
The agreement was extended multiple times — until it wasn't. Last August, the FDA indicated that the agreement would not be renewed after it expired on Oct. 1. A letter to stakeholders signed by Tracey Forfa, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, indicated no ill will, saying the relationship between the two parties "is not ending, but it will be evolving. FDA will continue to participate in AAFCO committees and meetings and work closely with AAFCO and states to help ensure the safety of the animal food supply."
Therrell at AAFCO expressed disappointment about the agreement's dissolution and said the group would "seek out additional partners that can provide strong, science-based guidance to our state officials."
Pros and cons of one path or the other
Under the partnership with Kansas State, there's a fee ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 for a new ingredient review, Therrell told VIN News by email. The fee depends on the scope of the review. With the AAFCO-FDA arrangement, there was no charge, and the FDA's now-separate review process also is free to access, according to Leah Wilkinson, vice president of public policy and education at the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA).
However, what the new AAFCO-Kansas State review offers is speed and efficiency, Wilkinson said. Therrell told VIN News that AAFCO's target time to complete the process is nine months. By comparison, the old AAFCO-FDA process could take years to complete.
To save that much time and reach the market sooner, Wilkinson said, "I think companies would be willing to make that investment" in review fees.
She added that trade association data from 10 years ago shows member companies lost $600,000 or more for every year that they were unable to sell a product. "In today's dollars, it would be much higher than that," Wilkinson said. "Our companies are being hindered by the inability to get these products to market in a reasonably timely fashion that still proves that they're safe."
The AFIA represents an array of industries. In addition to manufacturers of livestock feed, they include ingredient suppliers, equipment manufacturers and pet food makers.
A separate trade association that represents pet food businesses exclusively has a notably different perspective. Dana Brooks, president and CEO of the Pet Food Institute, believes seeking review and approval from the FDA is a safer, surer path, given the agency's explicit legal authority and her members' growing financial stakes.
By way of example, Brooks said that in 2007, the year the FDA and AAFCO started their partnership, the pet food industry was worth $14 billion. Over the next decade, it reached $30 billion, and today, its value is $64 billion, she said.
"I wonder if the growth of this space and this industry really highlights the need for FDA having a greater role in the process," Brooks said, pointing out that when pets become ill from a suspected problem with food, veterinarians and owners call the FDA. "That's where the investigations will start," she said. "They're not going to call AAFCO. Consumers don't know who AAFCO is."
George Burdock, a toxicologist and food safety consultant who has blogged about the AAFCO and FDA breakup, said in an interview by email that the FDA's legal primacy makes it a gamble for a business to sidestep FDA involvement. "The AAFCO procedure does not make your ingredient federally compliant, so you are at risk of having anything containing your product [deemed] as adulterated and seized," he said in an interview by email.
Brooks at the Pet Food Institute said she understands why businesses would want to use the faster, perhaps friendlier, process offered by AAFCO. "FDA has not always been very easy to work with," she said, "so I think maybe some stakeholders have been frustrated or burned by the FDA process. They're historically slow, or you felt like it was more reliable to go through the AAFCO process. This is where FDA is really going to have to step up and make sure they're following a timeline that's appropriate, that the process is transparent, and it's predictable."
To add another prospective wrinkle, legislation to place oversight of dog and cat food unambiguously in the FDA's hands, eliminating states' role, recently was reintroduced to Congress. Dubbed the Pet Food Uniform Regulatory Reform Act, or PURR Act, the bill initially was introduced in 2024 by a Republican sponsor but didn't make it out of committee. The revived bill has bipartisan support.