BIXBI certifies six cat kibbles days after a lead study

Six BIXBI cat kibble recipes earned Clean Label Project certification, the company announced on October 7th, 2026, five days after the same nonprofit reported detectable lead in 99% of the cat foods it tested. BIXBI's release cites that study.

The Clean Label Project published its cat food study on October 2nd, 2026, and the page was last modified October 5th, 2026. It tested 100 products from 62 brands, split into 31 dry, 40 wet and 29 air-dried or freeze-dried. It reported detectable lead in 99% of them, detectable cadmium in 96% and detectable arsenic in 94%.

Six cat kibbles join BIXBI's certified lineup

The newly certified recipes come from the Rawbble and Liberty lines, each in 3-pound and 10-pound bags. The company says testing covered heavy metals, pesticides, glyphosate, phthalates, bisphenols and acrylamide. The release says the standards draw on California's Proposition 65, EU and U.S. regulations and the nonprofit's own category data. It does not say how many batches were tested.

BIXBI says its certified lineup now stands at 19 dog and cat kibble recipes, and that it is working toward certifying its entire product line by the end of 2027. The release also says Rawbble Freeze-Dried Turkey, one of the products tested in the study, received what it calls the nonprofit's highest purity rating. That is company-reported. The study page names no individual products, since its product results sit in a PDF behind an email signup, though it lists Bixbi, Freshpet and Smalls as brands with certified cat foods.

This is the second round. The first was the kibble certifications announced in August, about two months earlier.

Certified kibble sits in the study's highest-lead format

Per Petfood Industry's account of the study, dry food carried about three times the lead of wet or air-dried food per calorie. All six new certifications are kibble. In our reading, a seal on dry food signals that these recipes cleared the nonprofit's own criteria in the format with the most lead per calorie in its study. The nonprofit's certification page says results are checked against chemicals on California's Proposition 65 list, and BIXBI's release adds category data as an input. Neither says how the two combine.

The Pet Food Institute disputed the study. Its CEO, Elise Fennig, said the findings rest on a single batch of each product and that "The mere presence of a metal does not indicate harm." According to Pet Food Processing, PFI also said the study measures products against a proprietary purity standard rather than established regulatory standards.

The company's own numbers reconcile. Thirteen kibble products in August plus six cat recipes makes 19. The nonprofit's certified products list showed 39 BIXBI entries in its brand filter on October 8th, 2026, and we did not determine whether that counts sizes, recipes or other formats. Six of the 19 dog and cat kibble recipes in BIXBI's count, about 32%, are the new cat recipes.

Whether certification becomes a retailer gate

A question for other brands is whether a seal from this organization turns into a shelf requirement. Freshpet, another certified cat food brand, reported second-quarter net sales up 15.5% across its whole business. That growth is not tied to certification, and we draw no link between the two.

Look for a volume brand to certify cat food, or for a retailer to add the seal as a filter. In our view, either would move it from marketing badge toward gate.

For now, the seal is voluntary and private, not regulatory.

Source: BIXBI Pet via PR Newswire