A proposed FDA rule recognizes one specific edition of the AAFCO ingredient book. Everything approved after it may not count.
There is a date sitting inside a proposed federal rule, and it is doing more work than a date should.
Under the FDA's 2026 GRAS proposal, a notification exception would apply to animal food ingredients that are listed in — and used in accordance with — Chapter 6 of the 2024 AAFCO Official Publication, and that are not the subject of a public FDA statement expressing concern about their GRAS status.
Not the current Official Publication. Not the Official Publication as amended. The 2024 edition.
To be legally marketed, an ingredient in animal food — pet food included — has to be either the subject of an FDA-approved food additive petition or generally recognized as safe for its intended use. Those are the two doors.
For seventeen years there was a third path in practice. Beginning in 2007, a memorandum of understanding between the FDA and the Association of American Feed Control Officials gave the agency a role in reviewing ingredient definitions submitted through AAFCO's process. Those definitions were published in the AAFCO Official Publication, and state regulators — who actually enforce feed law — relied on that book.
The FDA announced on August 2, 2024 that the MOU would not be renewed. It expired October 1, 2024.
Hundreds of ingredients were defined through that process and are in use right now. Ending the arrangement without addressing them would have put their legal status in question overnight.
So on October 23, 2024, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine finalized Guidance for Industry #293. It states that despite the MOU's expiration, the agency generally does not intend to initiate enforcement action against the interstate marketing of ingredients listed in the ingredient definition chapter of the 2024 AAFCO Official Publication where FDA has no safety questions — or against the use of AAFCO-defined ingredient names that are not common or usual names, unless the name makes the label false or misleading.
On January 6, 2025, the agency finalized Guidance for Industry #294, describing an interim Animal Food Ingredient Consultation process for firms that would otherwise have used the AAFCO route.
Both documents did what they were meant to do. The existing shelf did not become illegal.
AAFCO did not stop defining ingredients. Working with Kansas State University Olathe, it established the Scientific Review of Ingredient Submissions program — SRIS — which began accepting applications in 2025 for new ingredient definitions and for modifications to existing ones.
SRIS is the mechanism by which the AAFCO Official Publication continues to grow past its 2024 edition.
Read the two together.
The proposed GRAS exception names the 2024 Official Publication. SRIS produces definitions that appear in Official Publications after 2024.
An ingredient reviewed and defined through SRIS in 2026 would therefore not automatically fall within the proposed exception — a point made directly in regulatory analysis of the proposal. Its sponsor would be looking at a GRAS notification or a food additive petition regardless of having gone through AAFCO's replacement process.
That is not an accusation of bad faith. Rules get drafted against a fixed reference point for good reasons; a moving target is difficult to write into regulation. But the practical effect, if the proposal were adopted as written, is that the new state-led review process and the federal exception would point at different lists.
It is a proposal. It is not current law and should not be read as one. Comment periods exist for exactly this kind of problem, and the mismatch is the sort of thing comments are for.
It is also a reason to stop treating AAFCO status as the whole answer. The consistent advice from regulatory counsel since the MOU lapsed has been to know the federal basis for an ingredient — approved food additive, GRAS notification, GRAS self-determination — rather than pointing at a book and stopping there.
For most of the last two decades, "it's in the AAFCO OP" was a sufficient answer for most people asking. The date inside this proposal is a reminder that it was always shorthand, and that the thing it was shorthand for has changed.
None of this appears on a bag.
An ingredient statement lists what is in the food. It does not record which of several federal pathways made that ingredient legal to sell, or whether the pathway that cleared it still exists in the form it had when it cleared.
Guidance for Industry #293 was finalized October 23, 2024; Guidance for Industry #294 was finalized January 6, 2025. The FDA–AAFCO memorandum of understanding expired October 1, 2024 after seventeen years. The 2026 GRAS rulemaking described here is a proposal and has not been adopted.