apples

What it is

Whole apple — flesh and peel — fresh or dried. Mostly water, gentle sugars, and pectin, a soluble fiber with a long history in settling stools. The famous seed worry (cyanogenic amygdalin) is real chemistry at trivial scale: pet foods use seedless apple material, and a swallowed pip is not an emergency.

Why it's in pet food

A palatable fiber source and a label-friendly word: apples read as wholesome because they are, in the modest amounts recipes actually carry. Expect them mid-to-late list, where their contribution is fiber and flavor, not macronutrients.

How Bowlmark scores it

Scores are deterministic math over the printed label — the rules below apply to every product identically, and nothing estimates or fills in a blank.

Apple is on the engine's whole-foods bonus list: any apple-containing entry in the TOP 12 earns +2, part of a bonus capped at 8 points across four distinct produce/omega terms. The counting is per TERM, not per entry — a label with both "apples" and "apple pomace" still banks the apple bonus once. Below position 12, apples are neutral.

Read the full methodology

Foods that list apples

Ranked by score where scores exist. Placement here is never sold.

• Open Farm Harvest Chicken & Ancient Grains Recipe93
• Open Farm Large Breed Grain-Free RawMix93
• Open Farm Large Breed RawMix with Ancient Grains93
• Open Farm Small Breed Chicken & Turkey Recipe93
• Open Farm Wild-Caught Salmon Dry Cat Food93
• Open Farm Wild Caught Salmon Recipe92
• Barrowfield Raw Frozen Raw Beef Recipe Patties91
• North Fjord Free-Run Turkey & Ancient Grains Senior91

Sources

• WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee — Selecting a pet food
• MSD Veterinary Manual — dietary management of GI disease

Related ingredients

• apple pomace
• artichoke
• bananas
• beets
• tomato pomace
• turnip greens

Further reading

• The marketing dictionary: which label words mean anything
• How to read a pet food label