Your Dog’s Food Starts Fresh. But What Happens Next?
Inside Freshtrusion® – the innovative process behind Broadleaf Grain Free
When we talk about the quality of dog food, we naturally tend to focus on the ingredients.
How much meat does it contain? Where has it come from? Is it freshly prepared? What else is in the recipe?
Those are all important questions. But there’s another one that’s asked far less often:
What happens to those ingredients after they arrive at the manufacturer?
Because starting with good ingredients is only part of the story. The way those ingredients are handled, prepared and cooked can matter too.
That brings us to something you may have noticed mentioned on Broadleaf Grain Free before: Freshtrusion®.
It has a slightly technical-sounding name, but the principle behind it is actually very simple.
What is Freshtrusion®?
Freshtrusion® is the process developed by our dog food manufacturer, GA Pet Food Partners, to enable freshly prepared meat and fish to be incorporated into dry pet food.
And importantly, according to GA, the process doesn’t simply begin when those ingredients reach the factory.
It starts at the source.
Fresh, chilled meat and fish are collected from the source and transported to GA’s manufacturing facility in Lancashire in refrigerated vehicles, helping to maintain freshness throughout the journey.
Once there, those ingredients are gently cooked in GA’s dedicated Meat Kitchen before being incorporated into the kibble.
So rather than thinking of Freshtrusion® simply as a way of cooking dog food, it makes more sense to think of it as a journey:
Source → chilled transport → gentle preparation → finished food.
And each stage has been designed around making better use of freshly prepared ingredients.
Why does the cooking process matter?
This is where things get particularly interesting.
Protein isn’t completely unaffected by cooking.
GA’s scientific paper on Freshtrusion® explains that thermal processing can alter the digestibility and bioavailability of proteins in meat. Research suggests that lower-temperature cooking can alter the structure of proteins in ways that make them more accessible to digestive enzymes, helping them to be broken down more easily.
Conversely, very high temperatures can cause oxidation, cross-linking and aggregation of proteins, potentially making them harder for digestive enzymes to break down.
That’s one of the reasons GA developed its gentler cooking approach.
In other words, it’s not simply about putting fresh meat into a recipe. It’s about considering what happens to that meat afterwards.
Fresh meat rather than simply a meat meal
This also helps explain a phrase you’ll see regularly across the Broadleaf range:
“Freshly prepared.”
Traditionally, dried meat meals can be used as a source of animal protein in pet food. GA contrasts this with its Freshtrusion® approach, which allows recipes to incorporate higher proportions of freshly prepared meat and fish.
GA says its fresh ingredients are kept chilled from source to its manufacturing facility, allowing them to be gently cooked before going into the finished food.
That distinction is worth understanding when you’re looking at the ingredients panel on a bag of dog food.
And we’ll be exploring exactly how to do that in another Broadleaf Dog Guide very soon.
Traceability matters too
There’s another part of the process we particularly like: traceability.
GA’s Ingredients Kitchen handles hundreds of different ingredients and recipes, with systems designed to provide traceability and confidence in the provenance of ingredients used in the food it manufactures.
For us, that’s an important part of what quality means.
It isn’t enough for an ingredient to sound good on the front of a bag.
We want to know where ingredients have come from, how they’ve been handled and what happens to them before the finished food reaches your dog’s bowl.
So, does Freshtrusion® make a difference to your dog?
Ultimately, your dog doesn’t care what the manufacturing process is called.
They care about what’s in their bowl.
But you might care about the journey it took to get there.
Freshtrusion® allows freshly prepared meat and fish to be incorporated into dry dog food while placing considerable emphasis on sourcing, freshness, controlled preparation and protein quality.
And that fits perfectly with the philosophy behind Broadleaf Grain Free.
We want to offer food made from quality ingredients – but we also believe those ingredients deserve to be handled and prepared properly.
Because when something goes into your dog’s bowl every single day, how it’s made matters too.
Want to know what’s really in your dog’s food?
Freshtrusion® is only one part of the story.
Next in The Broadleaf Dog Guide, we’re going to show you how to read a dog food label properly – from understanding meat percentages and ingredient lists to knowing what some of the terminology on the bag actually means.
Because the more you understand about what’s in your dog’s food, the easier it becomes to make an informed choice.
