BIXBI Bets Big on Pet Food's Most Disputed Certification

BIXBI certifies 13 kibble recipes for contaminants

BIXBI said its Rawbble, BIXBI, and ProteinBlend beef and chicken kibble lines earned Clean Label Project certification across 13 products, tested for heavy metals, pesticides, and plasticizers. The company is calling itself the first pet food maker to certify kibble specifically under the program, a distinction Clean Label Project confirms on its own certified-products list.

"Third-party certifications like Clean Label Project validate the standards we hold ourselves to every day," CEO Rachel D'Agostino said in the release.

BIXBI, founded in Louisville, Colorado in 2009, is independently owned and has built its identity on real-meat, minimal-filler recipes. The certification adds a badge to that pitch rather than changing the recipes themselves.

A certification with real critics and real revenue

Clean Label Project is not a neutral referee. Its February 2026 heavy-metals report drew a direct rebuttal from the Pet Food Institute, the industry's trade group, which said the report "does not disclose key information, such as sampling methods, analytical protocols, or how its findings compare to established safety thresholds," and flagged a specific error: the data failed to adjust for moisture content, which is required to compare fresh and dry foods on equal footing.

Trade press has made the same case for years. Coverage of the group's 2017 report and its 2026 repeat both note single-sample testing, no peer review, and no published underlying data, a pattern one industry column called "the same playbook."

None of that stops brands from paying to display the seal. Clean Label Project's own FAQ says certification is funded through "a mix of donations, grants, and certification fees from brands" that carry the mark, meaning the organization publishing the contamination reports also sells the products it tests a way to be named favorably instead.

That is the arithmetic operators are actually weighing. As of this writing, Clean Label Project's live certified-products list shows BIXBI carrying 19 pet products, not the 13 in Monday's release, six more than the announcement claims. Across the full list, the pet category totals 104 certified products from every brand combined. BIXBI's 13 alone account for roughly one in eight of every Clean Label Project-certified pet product that exists, a concentration that says less about pet food safety broadly and more about how few brands have bought in at all. Freshpet, the category's largest player by certified count at 71 products, remains the outlier other brands are being measured against.

What happens if certification becomes a shelf requirement

The open question is whether Clean Label Project's mark becomes something retailers or Chewy's product filters start treating as a baseline, regardless of what critics say about the underlying science. If that happens, the certification fee becomes a cost of doing business rather than a marketing choice, and brands that skip it risk looking evasive by default even if their ingredient safety is identical.

Watch whether a mainstream volume player, not just premium independents like BIXBI and Smalls, follows Freshpet into the certified column next. That would signal retailers are starting to treat the mark as a real gate rather than a niche credential, whatever the Pet Food Institute says about its rigor.

Source: BIXBI Pet Earns Industry-First Clean Label Project Certification for Dog Kibble Products, via PR Newswire