What’s really in your pet’s food — and whether it’s right for them.
TrueBowl turns an ingredient list you can’t read into a score you can act on in ten seconds. Species-specific, health-aware, budget-honest. No fear. No lectures.
the back of the bag is the only part that talks to us ↓
Ingredients — a bestselling grocery-store cat food
Ground yellow corn, corn gluten meal, chicken by-product meal, soybean meal, beef tallow (preserved with mixed tocopherols), animal digest, pea protein, salt, choline chloride, taurine, added colour…
TrueBowl Facts
Scored in Balanced mode. Same bag, scored for a dog — or for a cat with kidney disease — gives a different number, for different reasons.
Scan
Point your phone at the barcode. Works standing at the shelf — before the bag is in your cart.
Score
One number, 0–100, calibrated for your animal. A cat and a dog never share a rubric, because they don’t share a biology.
Understand
Plain-language reasons, not chemistry homework. You’ll know why the number is what it is — in the time it takes to read this card.
Swap
Better options at the price you actually pay. Not a guilt trip toward the $90 bag — a genuine step up you can afford this month.
A cat food scoring 40
Cats are obligate carnivores. A 40 here usually means plant protein is standing in for animal protein — corn gluten and pea protein pushing the numbers up on paper while the biology says otherwise. TrueBowl tells you that in one sentence, then shows you what a real step up costs.
A dog food scoring 40
Dogs handle plants better — so a 40 for a dog is a different diagnosis. Usually it’s filler doing too much of the work, vague “meat meal” with no named source, or an ingredient split hiding how much of the bag is starch. Different problem, different fix, different swap.
Cats and dogs get that treatment today — and so do 37 other species. Rabbits, bearded dragons, budgies, ferrets: each with a rubric built for its own biology, not borrowed from someone else’s.
Tell TrueBowl what your animal is living with, and the whole system adapts: the score re-weights, the flags change, and the suggested swaps are re-ranked for that condition — not just for the species.
Pick kidney support and vague meat sources get flagged harder, phosphorus-heavy patterns drop the score, and moisture starts to matter a lot more. Pick allergies and the most common trigger proteins are called out by name. Every condition, its own lens.
Educational, always — your vet outranks any app, especially here. TrueBowl helps you ask better questions between visits.
Condition: Kidney support
The feature I needed and didn’t have. Now it’s the first thing the app checks.
Every food you scan can be tagged per pet: ❤ loves 👍 likes 👎 dislikes. Six months from now, when a bag goes on sale and you can’t remember whether it was the one that came straight back up — TrueBowl remembers.
One household, one app, every bowl: the senior cat with kidney disease, the kitten who eats anything, the dog with the chicken allergy. Each gets their own score for the same bag.
In the app
Balanced mode
For real budgets and real weeknights. Good kibble exists, and “better” counts even when it isn’t perfect. Balanced mode scores against what’s genuinely achievable at your price point — and never shames the bag already in your cupboard.
Holistic mode
For when you’re optimizing. A stricter lens: named single-source proteins, minimal processing, no ingredient splitting, nothing hiding behind “natural flavour.” Same calm explanations — just a higher bar, because you asked for one.
A dog food containing chocolate
Not a low score. A hard ceiling. The math can’t argue its way around it.
Toxicity is species-specific, so the flag is too — onion is dangerous for a dog and worse for a cat at a lower dose; avocado is fine for most mammals and genuinely dangerous for a lot of birds. The system knows the difference, because it has to.
This isn’t a marketing claim about ingredient quality. It’s a hard-coded safety floor that no formulation trick can score its way past.
the reason for all of this
This app exists because of a cat.
Pepper was real. She was mine. She’s gone now — and what set TrueBowl in motion was her kidney disease, found later than it should have been, in years when I didn’t know how to read her label. I built this so nobody has to guess the way I did.
Live now
Products from Canadian and American shelves, scored across 39 species — cats and dogs through rabbits, reptiles, birds, and beyond — with health-aware scoring, pet profiles, and honest swap suggestions.
Next on the roadmap
Depth before breadth: verifying what’s already live, then reaching further.
The TrueBowl pledge
The score answers to one party: the animal eating the food. That’s Pepper’s clause, and it doesn’t get amended.