Commercial pet food companies use food formulation software to formulate complete and balanced dry (kibble) and canned diets. There are a number of different software programs available. Over the past 20 years, I have personally used Brill, Genesis and Winfeed. Brill is the program used by most pet food and livestock feed companies. It is a very versatile program that is particularly useful for least-cost formulating. Genesis is the software used by most human food companies (ie Heinz, Kraft etc). It is used to produce the nutritional labels that appear on human food products. For the recipes in my book, I used Winfeed, which is a software program developed in the UK. I use Winfeed for both home-made recipe formulation and for formulating commercial kibble recipes. I prefer this software because it allows me to do stochastic formulation. Stochastic formulation is based not just on the mean nutrient content of the ingredients but also on their standard deviations. This allows for much greater accuracy in predicting the nutrient content of the final recipe.

Food formulation software works as follows: potential ingredients are entered into a database. This database includes all nutrients of interest, for example all the essential nutrients defined by AAFCO, as well as non-essential nutrients, for example antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids etc. Targets can be set for the final recipe (ie AAFCO Nutrient Requirements for dogs). The software can then be used to generate a “complete and balanced” recipe. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, but in fact, the process is the same whether you are developing complete and balanced kibble or complete and balanced home-made recipes. The only difference is the ingredients contained in the database.

I have been formulating complete and balanced pet foods for more than three decades. I created my first cat food recipe in 1987 and have created hundreds of recipes since then. I earned a living as a pet nutrition consultant formulating recipes for pet food companies, both traditional kibble and also raw pet food companies, who were interested in selling complete and balanced recipes. If you want the best recipes delivering the highest quality nutrition, you should only trust a qualified and experienced pet nutritionist to develop recipes for your dog.