Natural

Natural, as a pet-food claim, has a defined meaning only in the United States, where [AAFCO](/glossary/aafco) limits it to products whose ingredients derive from plant, animal, or mineral sources without having undergone synthetic chemical processing, with a carve-out for added vitamins and minerals (AAFCO, 2024). That carve-out is the detail most owners miss: a food can be labelled natural and still, quite legitimately, contain a synthetic vitamin and mineral premix, because such fortification is usually what makes it a [complete food](/glossary/complete-food) in the first place. The US definition is therefore narrower than the everyday English sense of the word but is still not a measure of quality, digestibility, or nutritional superiority. In the European Union and the UK the situation is looser still: there is no equivalent binding definition, so under Regulation (EC) 767/2009 the term operates largely as a marketing message and must merely not mislead (Regulation (EC) 767/2009). This makes natural a useful case study in how the same word carries regulatory weight on one continent and almost none on another, a pattern it shares with [premium](/glossary/premium) and, in reverse, with [human-grade](/glossary/human-grade). For a premium buyer, the sensible response is to read the [ingredient order](/glossary/ingredient-order) and [analytical constituents](/glossary/analytical-constituents) rather than rely on the headline adjective. See the [Petipedia glossary](/glossary) for more on regulated versus marketing claims.

Petipedia · Editorial team

General documentary information. For an individual animal, a veterinarian's advice takes precedence over any online content.