Our Safety Information

Sources of Safety Information

TreatCheck's food safety database draws on a range of authoritative veterinary and nutritional sources, including published research in peer-reviewed veterinary journals, guidance from UK veterinary organisations and the British Veterinary Association, species-specific dietary and toxicology literature, and publicly available veterinary pharmacology databases.

For toxic substances, we rely on established toxicological data for each species wherever it is available. In areas where the science is uncertain or evolving — such as grape toxicity in dogs, where the specific toxic compound has not yet been identified — we err on the side of caution and advise avoiding the food entirely rather than suggesting a 'safe' amount that may not exist.

How Personalisation Works

Every food safety result in TreatCheck is generated in the context of your specific pet's profile. Species is the primary factor: a food that is safe for dogs may be toxic to cats, rabbits, or birds, and TreatCheck applies the correct species-specific database to every check.

Beyond species, your pet's age, weight, breed, health conditions, and known allergies are all factored into the result where relevant. For example, a food that is generally safe for adult cats may be inappropriate for a kitten, or may interact with a kidney condition in a senior cat. A food that is safe for large breed dogs in small quantities may be more hazardous for a very small dog where the same quantity represents a proportionally much larger dose.

This personalisation is what distinguishes TreatCheck from generic internet searches, which typically give one-size-fits-all answers that may not be appropriate for your specific animal.

The Limitations of Our Service

TreatCheck is a guidance and education tool. It is not a medical device, a clinical diagnostic service, or a substitute for professional veterinary advice. The safety ratings we provide represent our best assessment based on current published veterinary and nutritional knowledge, but they cannot account for every individual factor that might affect how your specific pet responds to a food.

Individual animals can have sensitivities, allergies, or metabolic variations not captured in a general profile. Veterinary knowledge is continually evolving, and there are areas — particularly around novel or emerging toxicity concerns — where scientific consensus is still forming. Some foods that are generally safe may be inappropriate for specific individual animals due to conditions that are not captured in our database.

We update our information regularly but cannot guarantee that every entry reflects the very latest research at all times. If you have concerns about a specific food for a specific animal — especially an animal with significant health challenges — please consult your veterinarian directly.

Transparency About Technology

TreatCheck uses a combination of a curated species-specific food safety database, AI-assisted analysis for natural language food queries, and an image recognition model for the Food Fingerprint Scanner feature. AI assistance allows us to handle the enormous variety of foods, product names, and ingredient combinations that users check — but the AI models are guided by our veterinary knowledge base and are not making clinical medical decisions.

Barcode-based checks use Open Food Facts and related product databases to retrieve ingredient lists, which are then checked against our safety database. The data in these third-party databases is crowdsourced and may occasionally be incomplete or inaccurate — we recommend always reading the full product label and not relying solely on TreatCheck for final verification of commercial product ingredients.