What Does "Table-Grade" Actually Mean?

Open any dog food aisle, online or off, and you'll find the same handful of phrases doing a lot of work: human-grade, table-grade, restaurant-quality, made with real ingredients. They sound like a guarantee. Mostly, they aren't one. (We've gotten into a few of these buzzwords before, including how loosely "natural" and "premium" get used industry-wide, in Nutrition Unleashed: Decoding Pet Food Buzzwords.)

That's not a knock on the brands using them. It's just the reality of how pet food gets labeled in the United States, and it's worth twenty minutes to actually understand, because it's the difference between reading a bag and being read to.

The one term that's actually regulated: "human-grade"

"Human-grade" (sometimes called "food-grade") is the one phrase in this conversation with real legal weight behind it, and it's stricter than most people assume.

Ingredients are generally sorted into two buckets. Food-grade (or human-grade) ingredients are ones that are legally edible: they're allowed to be sold for people to eat. Feed-grade ingredients are not: by regulation, they can only be fed to animals, usually because of what they are or how they were processed.

Here's the part that trips people up: an ingredient can start out as human-grade and stop being human-grade the moment it's handled a certain way. A chicken breast that would be perfectly fine on your own plate can become feed-grade the second it's processed in a facility or method that isn't approved for human food, even if nothing about the meat itself changed. "Made with human-grade ingredients" and "human-grade" are not the same claim, and the AAFCO framework (the Association of American Feed Control Officials, whose model standards most states use to regulate pet food) generally treats them differently for exactly this reason. If you want the fuller regulatory picture, including how AAFCO standards actually get set and enforced state by state, we walked through it in Navigating Pet Nutrition: Understanding AAFCO and Its Impact on Pet Food Regulations.

For a finished product, not just an ingredient, to legally carry the human-grade claim, the entire thing generally has to be made in a facility that's licensed and inspected to produce human food, under the same food-safety rules that apply to what's in your own kitchen. That's a real, checkable standard. It's also one that inspectors mostly verify on the bag itself, not in a company's ads, emails, or website copy. So a claim you see on a landing page and a claim you see printed on the packaging aren't held to the same scrutiny, which is exactly why it's worth checking the actual bag before you buy.

So "human-grade" isn't the problem. It's the floor.

None of this makes human-grade a bad standard. It's a real one, and a lot of pet food never clears it. But it's also, at this point, table stakes rather than a differentiator. It tells you the food was legally safe and handled properly. It doesn't tell you how the animal was raised, what it was fed, whether antibiotics or added hormones were used, or how the food was actually cooked.

That's the gap "table-grade" and terms like it are trying to fill, and it's also exactly why they need to be handled honestly. Unlike "human-grade," "table-grade" isn't a legally defined term. No regulator enforces it. Any brand can print it on a bag and mean almost anything by it.

We use the term ourselves. So we want to be straightforward about what we mean when we do.

Human-grade vs. Table-Grade, side by side

Here's the gap in plain terms. Human-grade tells you a food cleared a legal safety floor. It doesn't tell you much else.

Human-grade answers one question: was this safe and legal to eat. Table-Grade is our attempt to answer the four questions that are left over once that one's settled.

What we mean when we say Table-Grade

At DASH, Table-Grade isn't a certification and we don't present it as one. It's our own standard, the one we already hold our own food to (see the full breakdown on our Meet the Standards page), and we'd rather tell you exactly what's behind it than let the word do the work on its own.

We hold it to four standards. Each one is built to hold up under the same scrutiny you'd give your own dinner.

01. Sourcing: protein with a name, not a guess.

Our beef is 100% grass-fed. Our chicken is USDA Organic. Both are humanely raised, with no antibiotics ever and no added hormones in the beef. We name the proteins because "meat" and "poultry by-product" are legal categories that can hide a lot, and a named, specific protein is a claim you can actually go verify. More on where it all comes from on our sourcing page.

02. Processing: cooked to protect what's actually in it.

 We sous-vide our recipes at 165°F, low enough to lock in nutrients that higher-heat cooking drives out, hot enough to be food-safety complete. It's slower and more expensive than the way most dry and many fresh foods are made. We think that trade is the whole point. (Curious how that compares to kibble specifically? We broke that down in What's the Deal with Kibble?)

03. Nutrition: formulated, not just fortified.

Every recipe meets AAFCO's standards for complete and balanced nutrition, with clinically backed pre- and postbiotics built in, so a bowl of DASH is a full meal, not a topper dressed up as one. Those pre- and postbiotics are also doing real work on the digestion side, which we've written about separately in Promoting Better Poops for Dogs.

04. Heritage: sourcing built on a decade of doing this.

 DASH brings the sourcing heritage of the team that built ButcherBox, the same standard for knowing exactly what's going into the bowl. That's not a claim about ingredients, it's a claim about the people deciding which ingredients make the cut in the first place.

That's the whole standard. No vague superlatives, no invisible criteria you have to take on faith. If any of the four doesn't hold up, we'd want a customer to call us on it.

How to actually check any bag, ours included

You don't need a food science degree to cut through the marketing. A few honest questions do most of the work:

Does the bag name the actual proteins, or does it just say "meat" or "meat meal"? Does it say where and how the animal was raised, or just that it was? Does it tell you the cooking method and temperature, or just that it's "gently cooked"? And if a company uses "human-grade" or "table-grade" in its ads, does the same language actually appear on the bag itself, where a regulator could hold them to it?

If a brand can answer all four without hedging, that's worth something. If they can't, the label is telling you more by what it leaves out than what it puts in bold.

We built DASH's standard so we could answer every one of those questions without flinching. That's the whole point of calling it something in the first place.

If you want to see how the four standards actually show up in a box, take the two-minute quiz and we'll build a plan around your dog, or read how it works first if you'd rather see the process before the plan.