Nobody has to count: how dog food is regulated in the UK, and what that leaves out

In August, a British dog food company called Years recalled every one of its fresh meals. The reason was that owners had started reporting the same thing: a dog whose eyes had suddenly turned red, sticky and dull, and a vet diagnosing acute bilateral dry eye. In its severe form that condition can end in permanent damage to sight.

I make collars and leads. I am not a nutritionist and I have no standing to tell anyone what to put in a bowl. But a lot of the dogs wearing my work were eating this food, and when I went looking for the basic facts I found something I did not expect. Not a conspiracy. Something duller and worse.

Nobody in this country has to count.

What is actually known

Reports began reaching Years in late July. The company opened an investigation on 1 August. On 17 August it decided to recall, and the recall was announced publicly on 19 August, covering all of its fresh meals. Years has said the common link appears to be buckwheat, an ingredient added to its recipes a few months earlier, and that it is investigating its buckwheat supply and reformulating with quinoa instead.

What has not been established is cause. Years itself has said there is no conclusive evidence of a link, and it is right that the science is not settled. Buckwheat may turn out to be the culprit, or the carrier for something else, or a coincidence. I am not going to pretend to know, and neither should anyone else yet.

I will also say the obvious fair thing. Recalling every fresh meal while the cause is still unproven is the right instinct, and a lot of companies would have waited. That deserves saying before anything else in this article is read.

The number, and why it is not a real number

The figure being quoted is 192. It is worth understanding exactly what that figure is. It is the count of reports made directly to Years, by the owners who thought to contact the company, up to 18 August. It is not a regulator's figure. It is not a count of veterinary diagnoses. Nobody has audited it.

An owners' group set up after the recall passed two thousand members within days, filling with photographs, diagnosis letters and treatment bills. That is not two thousand affected dogs, and anyone repeating it as though it were is doing the story a disservice. It includes worried owners, former customers and people who simply want to follow it. Years has said as much, and on that narrow point the company is correct.

But hold both of those thoughts at once and you arrive at the real problem. The company's number is too low to be the whole picture. The group's number is not a measure of anything. And there is no third figure, because no organisation in the United Kingdom is under any obligation to produce one.

How dog food is actually regulated here

Pet food in this country is regulated as animal feed. The framework is Regulation 178/2002 for general food and feed safety, 183/2005 for hygiene and traceability, 767/2009 for labelling and claims, and 2017/625 for official controls. The Food Standards Agency is responsible for feed legislation, and enforcement is carried out by local authority trading standards officers and the Animal and Plant Health Agency. There is also a trade association, UK Pet Food, which companies join voluntarily.

The law is not toothless. Article 20 is worth reading in full, because it says that if a feed business considers, or has reason to believe, that a product does not satisfy feed safety requirements, it must immediately begin withdrawing it and inform the authorities. It must tell customers why, and recall from them if necessary.

Read that again and you will see the hinge the whole system turns on. Everything begins when the company itself forms the view that something may be wrong. Until then, nothing in the system is watching.

Compare it with veterinary medicine

If your dog has a bad reaction to a wormer or a vaccine, a different set of rules applies. Your vet can report it. You can report it yourself. And the company holding the licence has a legal duty to pass on reports it receives to the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, within fixed deadlines. The reports are collected centrally, and the data has been published as an open dataset.

That is a pharmacovigilance system. It exists because it was accepted, long ago, that a company cannot be the only party counting the harm caused by its own product. Here is the same test applied to the two things you might put into a dog on the same morning.

The gap is not an oversight by one company. It is the design. A dog can go blind and the only tally that exists is the one kept by the business that sold the food.

The part I went and checked

Years was founded in 2023 by Darren Beale, who is its chief executive. Before Years, he founded MuscleFood, an online meat and food business he has said he grew to around forty eight million pounds in sales before leaving. Companies House shows he resigned as a director in June 2019.

In February 2018, MuscleFood recalled more than sixty meat products. An unannounced Food Standards Agency inspection of its supplier, DB Foods, had found use-by dates that were not compliant with the requirements. Around twenty one thousand customers were affected. The FSA said there was no indication that anyone had become ill, and took no enforcement action against the business.

At the time, Beale said the recall had been caused by a supplier mistake on the use-by dates, that the supplier held the highest industry rating available, and, in his own words, "They (the supplier) have let us down."

The public register adds one detail to that. DB Foods was not an unrelated supplier. Companies House records show that D.B. Foods Limited and Muscle Foods Limited were both majority owned by the same holding company, D B Foods (Holdings) Limited, and that Beale was a director of that holding company on the date of the recall. This was not hidden at the time. Local reporting called DB Foods a sister company, and DB Foods said so itself in its own statement.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and wrong to overreach. There is no finding of wrongdoing against anyone. I checked the disqualified directors register and it is clear. MuscleFood did later collapse into administration, in July 2026, but that was seven years after he left and it has nothing to do with him.

I raise 2018 for one reason. It is the second time a food business founded by the same person has had to recall at scale, and on both occasions the explanation offered pointed at an ingredient that arrived from somewhere else. That may be bad luck. Ingredients genuinely do fail, and a business that buys them is genuinely exposed. I do not know which it is, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I do know is that no regulator anywhere is keeping the kind of record that would let any of us find out. If a person can be at the head of two mass recalls in a decade and there is no public register in which those two events sit next to each other, that is not a fact about him. That is a fact about us.

What should change

Not more paperwork, and not a register of founders. Three things, all of which already exist elsewhere in British law and could be extended to pet food more or less as they are.

1. An adverse event reporting scheme for pet food. Vets and owners able to report a suspected reaction directly to a regulator, exactly as they can for veterinary medicines. Reports collected centrally, not by the manufacturer.
2. A duty on manufacturers to pass on the reports they receive, to a deadline, whether or not they have yet concluded the product is unsafe. This is the change that matters most, because it removes the company's own judgement as the trigger for anyone else knowing.
3. A public incident register. If a food is being investigated, owners and vets should be able to see that without joining a Facebook group.

None of that would have stopped this. All of it would have meant we knew sooner, and that the number we are all quoting came from somewhere other than the company being asked about.

If your dog is affected

If your dog's eyes have suddenly become red, sticky, cloudy or dull, or your dog is blinking hard and struggling to open them, see a vet promptly and ask specifically about keratoconjunctivitis sicca. Early treatment matters with this condition. Keep every invoice and every diagnosis letter. Report it to the company in writing rather than by phone, so that there is a record, and report it to your local authority trading standards service, because that is the enforcement route that actually exists.

Owners affected are also organising. There is a Facebook group, Years Dry Eye Cases and Info, which is where most of what is publicly known came from first.

Why I have written this

I sell collars and leads. Nothing on this page is trying to sell you one, and I have not put a single product link in it. I have written it because a lot of my customers were feeding this food, because several of them have told me what the last three weeks have been like, and because the only reason any of us know anything is that owners compared notes with each other.

That should not be the system. It is currently the system.

If you think this is worth other people seeing, please share it. If you know something I have got wrong, tell me and I will correct it and say that I have.

Sources

• ITV News, recall announcement, 19 August 2026
• dvm360, case numbers and timeline
• IBTimes UK, the company's response and the owners' group
• Reporting a problem with a veterinary medicine, VMD
• Regulation 178/2002, Article 20
• UK Pet Food, governance of pet food manufacturing
• Food Manufacture, the 2018 MuscleFood recall
• Companies House, More Years Limited
• Companies House, Muscle Foods Limited, officers

Written 1 September 2026. Everything above is sourced to the links given. If any of it is wrong, or becomes wrong, write to me and I will change it.