Announcing the new KibbleLab

After almost two years, my co-founder and I have launched the new KibbleLab. It's a full rebuild, and it does something the first version couldn't: it walks you through the whole process of finding out what your pet reacts to, instead of assuming you already know.

Why we built it

We started this project because our Ragdoll, Poppy, had severe food sensitivities. We'll spare you the gory details. At the time we didn't really know what was going on. All we knew was that he was having ongoing stomach issues and that every test run on him came back inconclusive.

We took a methodical approach to figuring out which ingredients to avoid. It worked, but it was tough. We spent hours on the weekends in pet stores reading labels, mapping out the ingredients in each food, cross-referencing the overlap between the foods that went badly, and hunting for a food that either dropped a suspected ingredient or introduced a novel protein we hadn't tried.

In the end this worked for us, but nobody should have to do it by hand. That's the whole reason KibbleLab exists.

V1 was great if you already knew what you were looking for, but it turned out that most people didn't.

What we got wrong

The feedback after launch was consistent. People didn't know which ingredient to suspect, how to run a trial, what counts as a result, or what to do with one when they got it. We had built the last mile and skipped the first. The bones were good, but the product asked for expertise that the people who needed it most didn't have yet.

So we went back to the drawing board and asked a different question: what would it take to go from "something is wrong with my pet and I don't know what" all the way to a specific, testable answer you can bring to your vet? That question is what brought us to the new platform.

What's new

A guided path instead of a search box. Onboarding routes you down one of six tracks depending on what you're actually dealing with, from food sensitivity to weight loss to a brand-new puppy. The dashboard, the tools, and the recommendations all change to match.

Structured food trials. The elimination process, run properly: an eight-week default trial (following Olivry and Mueller's work on how long these actually need to run), daily symptom check-ins, and a clear tolerated / trigger / inconclusive outcome that you set yourself. You end up with a hypothesis worth taking to a vet rather than a hunch.

Ingredient Intelligence. We mapped 2,000+ ingredients into 5,000+ relationships, so the platform knows that chicken fat and turkey liver both trace back to poultry, and that "meat by-product" could be several things. Once an ingredient is on your pet's list, every search and comparison in KibbleLab accounts for it, including the ingredients that are the same thing under a different name. This is the part I'm proudest of, and there's a longer write-up of how it works.

Health tracking that produces something useful. Weight, body condition scores, symptom logs, and goal progress all roll up into a vet-shareable report you can hand over at your next appointment.

Real credentials behind the guidance. My co-founder earned the NAVC Certified Pet Nutrition Coach certification while we were building this, so our scoring rubric, feeding guidelines, and weight management advice follow published nutrition science rather than our opinions. We're not veterinarians, and KibbleLab isn't veterinary advice. It's meant to make the conversation with your vet a better one. You can read the methodology in full.

6,000+ US pet foods, kept current. The catalog carries full ingredient lists, guaranteed analysis, and scoring for every product. FDA recall data syncs daily, and if a recall touches a food you've saved or logged, you get an alert. That part is free and doesn't need a subscription. (If you're reading this and happen to build in this space, the underlying dataset is available.)

Try it

The core of KibbleLab is free: create a pet profile, search the catalog, get recall alerts. KibbleLab+ unlocks more pets, vet reports, product data, a tracking suite, and more.

Go have a look, and tell me what's missing. This rebuild came straight from user feedback, and future ones will too.