Whole Foods First: How We Built a Better Poultry Recipe
Billy Hoekman, Senior VP of Nutrition and Formulation
What actually goes into making a healthy dog food?
Creating a complete and balanced diet isn't just about choosing great ingredients. It's about understanding how every ingredient works together to provide the nutrients your dog needs to thrive.
That’s how we approached our new poultry recipes in our Extras Line. At Green Juju, every recipe begins with whole foods. Science simply helps us build on what nature already provides.
Building the Foundation
Have you ever looked at the ingredient panel on a bag of dog food and wondered how it all comes together?
Every complete dog food sold in North America has to meet nutritional standards established by AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control Officials). Those standards help ensure dogs receive the vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins they need throughout different stages of life.
At Green Juju, we don't rely on just one method to verify our recipes. We use formulation software, laboratory testing, feeding trials, and nutrient formulation together to confirm our diets are complete and balanced.
But meeting those standards is only the starting point. Our goal was to create the most nutrient-dense poultry recipes possible using whole foods.
It begins with pasture-raised chicken, turkey, and duck. Birds raised outdoors eating grass and insects naturally develop richer levels of vitamins and minerals than conventionally raised poultry.
From there, every part of the bird has a purpose. Muscle meat provides protein and essential nutrients. Heart and liver deliver an incredible concentration of vitamins and minerals, with liver serving as nature's multivitamin. Bone supplies calcium and important trace minerals.
But poultry alone doesn't create the nutritional balance we're looking for. That's where our whole wild-caught sardines come in.
Sardines naturally provide nutrients that are difficult to find elsewhere, including Vitamin D and the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA. They also help balance poultry's naturally higher omega-6 content, creating a healthier fatty acid ratio that supports a normal inflammatory response.
Rather than adding isolated nutrients, we let whole foods work together to build a more complete recipe.
Building on Nature
Once the nutritional foundation is in place, science helps us make those whole foods work even harder.
Fermented seaweed provides iodine along with a broad range of naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and antioxidants. Fermentation also makes many of those nutrients easier to absorb while creating beneficial compounds like organic acids and Vitamin K2, an important nutrient for healthy bones.
You'll also find a concentrated whole-food vitamin and mineral blend in every recipe. Ingredients like organic mushrooms, broccoli, carrots, berries, leafy greens, and marine microalgae provide the naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients found in fresh produce without significantly increasing carbohydrates.
It's another way we can provide complete nutrition while staying true to whole-food ingredients.
The Green Juju Difference
Green Juju has always believed that nature already has it right. Science isn't there to replace whole foods; it's there to understand them better and use them more effectively.
By combining thoughtfully sourced ingredients, nutrient-dense whole foods, and modern nutritional science, we've created poultry recipes that stay true to everything Green Juju believes about feeding dogs.
That's how we took poultry and made it Green Juju.
