Carrot a popular ingredient in dog and cat food

If you’ve ever had a dog that got a taste for carrots out of the garden, you know dogs love carrots. Baby carrots are a commonly used treat.

If you’ve ever had a dog that got a taste for carrots out of the garden, you know dogs love carrots. Baby carrots are a commonly used treat. By searching recipes in the Dog and Cat Food Ingredient Center’s online database, we find the following figures for carrot use in recipes:

42 percent of the recipes for dry dog food contain some form of carrot.
33 percent of dry cat food recipes contain some form of carrot.
Carrot use is highest in canned dog food, with it being found in 47 percent of recipes. 
26 percent of canned cat food recipes contain some form of carrot.

carrots in pet food
Carrots are found in nearly 50 percent of canned dog food recipes.

We refer to some form of carrot to account for the many forms of carrot used and how they are listed in the ingredient deck. In dry dog food it can be broken down as carrots in 30 percent of recipes, dried carrots in 9 percent. These forms each listed in less than 1 percent of recipes: fresh carrot, organic carrot, whole carrot and carrot pomance.

Canned dog food manufacturers list carrots in 43.5 percent of recipes, with organic carrots in 3 percent of recipes and dried carrots, fresh carrots and baby carrots all in less than 1 percent of recipes. It’s interesting that this is the only category where organic shows up in any great number.

In dry cat food, carrot is listed in 23 percent of recipes, dried carrots in 8 percent, with other variations making the other 2 percent.

Canned cat food lists carrots in 25 percent of recipes, with other variations in 1.5 percent, for a total of 26.5 percent of the recipes. 

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