Aren’t Fish Food Companies Required To Itemize Ingredients?

[HUKIT]

I will be honest and say that I haven’t really tried any of Xtreme’s foods as I’ve been using NF/NLS with the latter being used for two decades, but I was at a local fish store grabbing more Northfin Tropical sticks and one of the employees I’ve known for a few years said “you need to try this” which he handed me a bag of Xtreme NICE Crumbles. This label looks like something I’d see 30 years ago and doesn’t even let you know what the ingredients are. Animal protein products can be essentially anything, processed grain byproducts, and plant protein products. So I looked at their website and it’s different too, changing animal protein products to marine protein products. My understanding is the FDA regulations require proper identification of the product, net quantity statement, name, and place of business of the manufacturer or distributor, and proper listing of all the ingredients in the product from most to least, based on weight(from FDA.GOV). Does saying it’s animal proteins meet the FDA requirements? Out of boredom and curiosity I emailed Xtreme two days ago to ask and I didn’t receive a reply. AAFCO did reply and said that does not meet their standards for ingredient definition process. It’s the second time this week I’ve gone down the rabbit hole after having conversations with other hobbyists so clearly I should just stop talking to people.

 

[jjohnwm]

I used to feed a couple of different recipes from this brand in past years. As local availability of alternative brands became better, and more importantly as I starting paying much more attention to fish food labels, I moved away from them. I still have a bunch of those handy plastic wide-mouth jars they came in, and some still have labels. I just checked a couple (both the same product: Extreme Spirulina Crave Flake) and they seem to be labelled as we expect rather than in that vague say-nothing way shown in your pic.

The Spirulina Crave stuff contains Spirulina, Wheat Flour, Fish Mea, Soy Flour, Shrimp Meal, Wheat Germ Meal, Soy Protein Isolate, Grain Distillers Dried Yeast, Fish Protein Concentrate, Soy Lecithin, Krill Meal, Fish Oil, Dried Kelp, Corn Starch and then a long list chemical gobbledygook. I recall when I startrred compulsively reading fish food labels it sounded okay, much better than many competitors but not as good as some. These labels probably date back about 10 years.

Seems they have gotten purposefully less informative in their labelling?

 

[danotaylor]

I’ve never heard of nor seen “nice crumbles” advertised. That label is terrible though fo’sho.
I bought this 2 weeks ago, and had to go check my xtreme Cichlid PeeWee label;



I have an empty jar of big fella which was from 2024, exactly the same formula on label;

First 4 ingredients seem decent. Honestly not too aure about the rest

 

[RD.]

Said it from the get go, never been a fan of the ingredients used by Xtreme. IMO it’s nothing more than a slightly fancier version of a generic farm feed. In fact, I believe Ziegler used to make their food, maybe they still do.

 

[Milingu]

I would stay away from any product that doesn't even specify what type of animal protein is used. Here in Europe, one of the biggest fish food producers recently changed a lot of it's products to mammal protein. I guess it's due to cost cuts. But for me the brand is dead now, because mammal products don't belong in fish food at all.