Do I have to follow your feeding chart exactly?

Short answer: not to the gram, but stay inside the food groups. Swap between the permitted proteins and vegetables as much as you like. What actually matters are four exclusions — organ meat, bone, stacked supplements, and a big starch load — because each of those changes a nutrient the sachet is already dosing.

People ask this nervously, as though they are about to be told off. The nervousness is understandable and the answer is more relaxed than they expect — and importantly, the relaxed answer is the accurate one. Saying “yes, follow it exactly” would be the safe-sounding reply, and it would also undersell what we actually did.

Why there is more room than you think

Two things give the system slack before you touch anything.

First, energy is served at a 10% buffer over calculated requirement. Second, and much bigger: cut-to-cut variation in meat runs ±25–30% on its own. Chicken breast against skin-on thigh. Lean leg against shoulder. Before you trim a single piece of fat.

Against that background, the difference between what you cooked on Tuesday and what you cooked on Thursday is noise. Your butcher introduces more variation than your swapping does.

So: swap between the permitted proteins freely. Chicken for mutton for fish for egg — the permitted protein set is here — in whatever proportions suit your week, your budget and your animal’s preference. Vary the vegetables within the allowance. Use whichever cuts looked good that day. None of that breaks anything.

Why we can say that — and most people cannot

Wondering how this applies to your own pet? Build their bowl — two minutes, and it gives the exact grams for their weight.

This is the bit that matters, so here it is plainly.

Conventional formulation validates one recipe, and validates it against a floor rather than a target. If you validate one recipe, then any deviation genuinely is outside your evidence, and “follow it exactly” is the only honest thing you can say.

We did not do that. Because our product corrects a bowl you cook, a single recipe would not represent what anyone actually feeds. So we simulated over a million bowls across the full range the protocol permits — varying species, body weight, the activity and status multiplier and the composition of the food itself — and evaluated each one against NRC 2006 requirements and the applicable safe upper limits.

That study is on the site, with the per-nutrient tables. It is the reason we can tell you substitution within the groups is covered: we did not check one example recipe, we checked the space. The framework behind that approach is written up separately, and the protocol it tests is here.

The four things that genuinely do break it

These are exclusions rather than preferences, and each one has a specific mechanism behind it.

Liver and organ meat

The biggest of the four. Liver is extraordinarily dense in vitamin A and copper, and both of those have real upper limits — copper in particular has no agreed upper limit in the way people assume — they are not nutrients where more is simply better. Our sachet already carries a vitamin A load, because the palatant that makes it taste of something is liver-derived. Adding organ meat on top of that is exactly how a careful owner overshoots a ceiling.

It is also why our bowl deliberately leaves organ out rather than treating it as a bonus. The absence is a design decision, not an oversight.

Bone

Calcium is the single largest correction the sachet makes, because muscle meat is calcium-poor and phosphorus-heavy — that imbalance is most of the reason a home bowl needs correcting at all, and calcium is where nearly every homemade bowl goes wrong. Add bone and you are dosing calcium twice.

Separately and independently: fed bone is a real physical risk. Gastrointestinal perforation is not a rare presentation in clinics. We are bone-free on both counts.

Other supplements stacked on top

A multivitamin. A joint powder. A calcium tablet. A fish oil capsule. Each one individually sensible; stacked on a bowl that is already corrected, they can push past the ceilings on the nutrients that have them.

Our sachet is a correction, not an addition — it is sized to the gap, which means what it carries is already spoken for. The full position on this, including why a vet-prescribed supplement is a different case, is here.

A carbohydrate load

Cats need at least 95% of calories from animal sources; dogs at least 85%, counting dairy. Rice and starch displace the protein the animal actually needs, and for a cat in particular they are dilution rather than nutrition.

A little during a transition is fine. As a daily filler to make the bowl look bigger, it moves the diet outside what we calculated against.

Do not take our word for it

We publish the tools rather than asking you to trust the chart. Put what you actually feed into the free bowl checker and see where it lands. It will tell you what your current bowl is short on before you change a thing, and it works whether or not you ever buy from us.

The boundary, stated plainly

You are free to feed your animal however you judge best. That is not our call to make.

What we will not do is sell you a correction for a bowl it does not correct. If your diet sits outside the permitted space, our sachet does not apply to it — not because we are precious about the chart, but because the dose would be wrong and you would have no way of knowing by how much.

Use the checker, feed what works, and if the two part company, feed what works.