Potatoes – whether they are white or sweet – are found in a high percentage of dog and cat foods, in both wet and dry recipes. We used the newly improved Ingredient Search function of the Dog and Cat Food Ingredient Center to analyze the usage of both types of potatoes and their derivatives in dog and cat food.
A wild-card search of potato – which includes any ingredient listing with the word potato in it – finds potato in 42.6 percent of dry dog food recipes, 46.1 percent of wet dog food recipes, 39.2 percent of dry cat food recipes and only 23 percent of wet cat food recipes.
Both white and sweet potatoes are used in a large number of dog and cat food recipes. Many recipes contain both. The * indicates a wild-card search was used, so the number includes all recipes that contain any form of that word or phrase.
We can break that down between sweet potatoes and white potatoes. Doing a wild-card search for all ingredients that contain sweet potato finds sweet potato in 27.5 percent of dry dog food recipes, 17.7 percent of wet dog food recipes, 23 percent of dry cat food recipes and 10 percent of wet cat food recipes.
To break out the different variations of white potatoes in recipes, we used the or search capability of the tool to include every variant of white potatoes in the database. This includes potato, potatoes, dried potatoes, dehydrated potatoes, whole potatoes, Yukon Gold potatoes, potato protein, potato starch and other variations.
That search found some form of white potato in 28 percent of dry dog food recipes, 35 percent of wet dog food recipes, 28 percent of dry cat food recipes and 16 percent of wet cat food recipes.
Note that many recipes contain both white and sweet potato ingredients, so the breakout of sweet and white potatoes add up to a greater number than the combined.
We also looked at how white potatoes are used in dry dog food.
Potato – whether listed at potato, potatoes, whole potatoes, organic potatoes, fresh potato or a specific potato such as Russet or Yukon Gold – was listed in 21 percent of recipes.
Dried potato – whether listed as dried or dehydrated – is listed in 5.53 percent of recipes.
Potato protein is listed in 5 percent of recipes.
Potato starch is listed in 4.7 percent of recipes.
The most common listings for white potatoes are broken out. Many recipes have more than one form of potato in them, such as potato and potato starch both listed as ingredients.