This year, pet food companies’ primary safety focus will be supplier verification and ingredient tracing — at least if responses to a recent poll on PetfoodIndustry.com are representative of the industry overall. If so, then 38% of companies will be focusing on that area.
That’s sound strategy, according to Will Henry, owner of Turkey Creek Holdings and a 30-year veteran of pet food manufacturing. In an Ask the Pet Food Pro Zoom chat on February 24, 2026, he said supplier verification and ingredient consistency are “non-negotiable.”
“As a manufacturer, you cannot waiver on the COAs [certificates of analysis] for ingredients — you just can’t,” he stressed. He recommended annual supplier audits, transparent communication about sourcing changes and clear requirements for region-specific sourcing where formulation consistency demands it, as my colleague, Lisa Cleaver, reported.
Even a commodity ingredient like wheat can introduce process variability if sourced from multiple regions, affecting everything from bulk density to extrusion behavior to pathogen load, Henry added.
Do some pet food safety areas need more attention?
Supplier verification was just one safety area Henry homed in on as among the most important. Others included people as the foundation of a food safety system; the nature of food safety as an ongoing need and focus (not a “one-and-done exercise”); the introduction of pathogen risk when facilities or equipment are changed; rising protein inclusion rates in pet food, which may outpace existing production steps to kill pathogens (kill steps); why internal challenge studies are essential to bridge the lab-to-plant gap; the fact that preventive controls can never be compromised; why objective, outside assessment is critical to risk assessment; and how management must model a food safety culture for staff.
How do pet food companies’ safety plans and processes measure up to some of those critical areas, according to the PetfoodIndustry.com poll? Not well, to be honest, aside from supplier verification.
“Facility sanitation and environmental monitoring garnered 10% of responses, while finished product testing, employee training and safety culture, and supply chain risk assessment each received 5%,” Cleaver reported. She noted that process controls and validation, along with regulatory compliance and documentation, received 0% as a primary focus area. Perhaps even worse, 38% of respondents (the same percentage as naming supplier verification as a focus) said their companies have no primary safety focus identified.
Work to do addressing disconnects and lack of safety knowledge
It seems some pet food companies may have work to do when it comes to their safety programs. On the positive side, however, nearly 30% of the poll respondents said their companies’ investments in pet food safety have significantly increased over the past three years, and 10% of companies’ investments have risen somewhat. Only 1.43% said their investments had decreased, while 7.86% said they had at least remained the same.
Not so positive: More than 51% chose “not applicable/don’t know” about any changes to their companies’ safety investments. In the best-case scenario, that means respondents have limited insight into their companies’ budget decisions, possibly indicating an opportunity to strengthen internal communication around food safety strategy, as Cleaver pointed out. But, the high response rate to that choice could instead mean fragmented safety ownership within an organization or disconnects in those all-important areas of people, culture and training.
