From Point A to Point B with Open Farm Ingredient Traceabilty + Giveaway

One week from today, Boca and I will embark on our 1700 mile road trip to BlogPaws. Our trip is being generously sponsored by Open Farm, a pet food I can proudly promote due to their dedication to humane farming practices and sustainable fishing standards. They recently added one more layer to my confidence with an ingredient traceability function on their website, which makes following the path of the food's ingredients to The Ginger Sisters' bowls as simple as mapping my route to BlogPaws. 

I'm a planner, and I knew I wanted to take two days driving to and from Phoenix, AZ. I prefered not to travel the same stretch of road twice so I decided to make a big loop, incorporating my old hometown of Cortez, CO on the way, and stop through Santa Fe, NM, where I spent a summer living with my aunt and working at a polo barn after college. In addition to the gorgeous location of the conference, the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort, I'll be checking out some other pet-friendly accommodations along the way, as well as visiting some friends. We'll be blogging, tweeting, and Instagram-ing from the road, using the hashtag #bocasbigadventure.

Since it was time to open a new bag of kibble for Ruby and Boca, it was the perfect opportunity to try out the new transparent sourcing feature on the Open Farm website. I had all three recipes to choose from, but felt that the Whitefish & Green Lentil recipe seemed the most seasonally appropriate for summer, especially for my former island girl, Boca. The origin of pet food ingredients has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and with good reason. Pet parents are concerned about where the meat, meals, fruits, vegetables, vitamins and minerals come from since the devastating pet food recalls of 2007.

Even when products say "Made in the USA" it's no guarantee of the individual ingredients' source. Open Farm has taken the guesswork out of this by providing detailed information about the components of each bag of pet food, down to every last vitamin and mineral (none of which are from China). All I needed was the lot code off the back of the bag, which I could then enter in to the "See What's In Your Bag" link on the Open Farm website.

Above you can see part of the results for our bag of Whitefish & Green Lentil. Additionally, the lot code specifies which fish is used since it can change with the season. In this case, our bag contained wild caught Alaskan Pollock. All of the vegetable ingredients were grown in the U.S., and as I moved down the list, the majority of the vitamins were also sourced in the U.S., along with Germany, Switzerland and France. I am a person who thrives on knowledge and Open Farm allows me to have all of the information about what goes into their food, my dogs' bowls and into our suitcase next week

Boca is very fond of her food and will be eating an assortment of Open Farm kibble on our travels - my plan is to portion out her daily meals and feed them to her throughout the day like treats. Watch for our upcoming post about packing for a summertime trip with a dog and we will see you from the road! In the meantime, Open Farm is giving our readers the chance to try the first Certified Humane pet food. I promised Boca that we weren't giving away her beloved bag. Enter the giveaway below for a chance to win one of two 4.5 lb bags of the Homestead Turkey & Chicken recipe, open to U.S. residents only:


a Rafflecopter giveaway

This post is sponsored by Open Farm as part of our Road to BlogPaws series. You can visit Open Farm on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.