What “human grade” actually means on a pet food label

What the phrase actually has to mean

So what does a brand have to do to earn the words? More than you might guess. “Human grade” is a claim defined by AAFCO and state feed control officials, and it is permitted only under a strict condition: every ingredient, and the finished product, must be stored, handled, processed, and transported in compliance with the FDA regulations for human edible food (21 CFR Part 117). In plain terms, the whole finished product has to be legally edible by a person, and it has to be made in a facility licensed for both human and animal food (AAFCO Human Grade Pet Food Standard). The kibble in the bowl, in theory, could go on your plate.

The standard is unforgiving in one way that matters to you: a single feed-grade ingredient sinks the whole claim. A food can be built from excellent components and still fail to be human grade if one item in the recipe, or one step in the supply chain, drops below the human edible bar. That is why you see the phrase less often than the shelf suggests. Most pet food is “feed grade” instead, a different and lower legal standard, and feed grade is simply the default the entire category is built on.

What it does not buy you

Here is the part the packaging tends to blur, and the part worth holding onto. “Human grade” describes sourcing and handling. It does not describe nutrition. The phrase alone does not make a food more complete, more balanced, or healthier than a feed-grade one. Those are separate questions, answered by the nutrient profile and the feeding evidence, not by whether a person could legally eat the kibble.

It also helps to drop a quiet assumption you may be carrying: “feed grade” does not mean bad. It is the standard most of the well-formulated, AAFCO-complete foods on the market are made to, and a feed-grade diet can be more nutritionally sound than a human-grade one that happens to be poorly balanced. So the honest read for you is this: human grade tells you something true but narrow about how the food was made, and almost nothing about whether it is the right food for the animal in front of you. We treat it the way we treat any claim, by separating what the words guarantee from what they merely imply. The same discipline runs through how we read the rest of the label, which we lay out in our guide to pet food marketing claims.

It is a claim with teeth

You might assume “human grade” is a soft marketing word nobody actually checks. It is not. On March 17, 2026, BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division issued a decision in a Fast-Track SWIFT challenge brought by The Farmer’s Dog, recommending that Freshpet discontinue claims that convey its dog food is “human grade,” such as the “same level of quality I want in my own food” messaging. Freshpet stated it will comply (National Advertising Division / BBB National Programs).

You do not need to pick a side in that dispute, and we are not making a quality judgment about either company. What matters for you is simpler: a self-regulatory body looked at how a “human grade” implication was being communicated and told a brand to change it. That means the claim carries a real definition, and that companies can be held to it. If you want more on fresh-food honesty and how these claims get tested, see our piece on whether fresh dog food lives up to the marketing.

What this means when you are scoring a bag

So here is how to use all of this at the shelf. Our rubric does not score the phrase “human grade.” It scores label transparency and nutrition, the things the words on the bag can actually be checked against. We do not give “human grade” credit as a quality signal, for the same reason we do not credit “vet recommended”: a claim that is hard to verify and easy to imply is not, on its own, proof of a better food. If you want the longer version of that argument, we made it about another popular phrase in why “vet recommended” means almost nothing.

To be clear, this is not us saying human-grade foods are worse, or better. It is us asking you to read the claim for what it is. When a human-grade product also lists its ingredients clearly and meets the nutritional bar, those are the things that move our score, not the two words on the front. You can see exactly which inputs we reward, and which we ignore, in the dog food methodology.

- The PetScored desk. Next time the front of the bag tries to sell you, our guide to pet food marketing claims walks you through the rest of it, and you can see how we weigh what we can verify in the dog food methodology.