kale

Fruit & vegetable

Kale holds a leafy-green seat on the bonus roster — real nutrition, wellness-culture baggage, and a moderate-oxalate footnote between spinach and collards.

Also appears on labels as: dried kale

What it is

Kale, fresh or dried: a sturdy brassica leaf carrying carotenoids, vitamin K, calcium, and fiber. Its oxalate load sits in the middle of the leafy-green range — meaningfully below spinach, above collards — and its brassica goitrogens matter only at chronic doses no recipe approaches.

Why it's in pet food

Nutrient density plus the halo it earned in human wellness culture; on a pet label kale signals the same aspiration. At recipe inclusions it's a modest, genuine green. At home it's fine cooked and chopped, in vegetable-sized amounts.

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.

Kale is a whole-foods bonus term: +2 when it appears in the top 12, counted once per label, inside the produce bonus's 8-point cap. No deductions at any dose the engine sees. The oxalate context lives here and in the notes — the roster rewards the leaf; it doesn't adjudicate stone-forming history, which is Fit-layer and vet territory.

For dogs

Cooked and modest is the pattern; for dogs with oxalate-stone history, collard greens are the gentler leaf and your vet owns that diet plan.

Read the full methodology

Foods that list kale

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

Compare foods that list kale

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Sources

Related ingredients

Further reading

Cite this page

Bowlmark. "Kale in pet food — what it is and how it scores." https://www.bowlmark.com/ingredient/kale

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Last verified August 12, 2026

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