When the FDA-AAFCO agreement ended, the agency offered a consultation in its place. A consultation is not an approval.
For seventeen years, a company with a new pet food ingredient had a route: submit it to AAFCO's ingredient definition process, the FDA performs a scientific review, and if it clears, the ingredient and its definition appear in the AAFCO Official Publication — the book state feed control officials actually enforce from.
That route closed on October 1, 2024, when the memorandum of understanding between the FDA and AAFCO expired without renewal.
What the FDA offered in its place is called the Animal Food Ingredient Consultation — AFIC — finalized as Guidance for Industry #294 on January 6, 2025.
An interim process by which a firm can engage with the FDA about an ingredient it would otherwise have taken through the AAFCO definition route.
Read that sentence carefully. It describes engagement.
The two ways an ingredient becomes legal to market in animal food have not changed: an FDA-approved food additive petition, or generally recognized as safe status for the intended use. AFIC is a conversation with the agency. It is not a third door.
Guidance for Industry documents are, by their own terms, non-binding. They describe the agency's current thinking. They are not regulations and they do not carry the force of one.
That is true of AFIC. It is also true of Guidance for Industry #293 — the enforcement policy document that keeps hundreds of previously AAFCO-defined ingredients marketable by stating that the FDA generally does not intend to initiate enforcement action against them.
"Does not intend to initiate enforcement action" is a description of prosecutorial discretion. It is a good deal more than nothing and a good deal less than an approval.
The entire current arrangement in animal food ingredients rests on documents in that register.
The practical effect of the change is that the cost and the timeline of introducing a new ingredient moved.
The AAFCO route had a defined submission process, a published outcome, and a book that state regulators recognized. What replaced it is a consultation with a federal agency, plus the standing options of a food additive petition or a GRAS determination — both of which are substantially heavier lifts than filling out a submission form.
The American Feed Industry Association said as much when the MOU was ending, warning that dissolving it would increase regulatory uncertainty and potentially raise the time and cost of approving new animal food ingredients.
Larger companies have regulatory staff for this. Everyone else has the guidance documents and the phone.
Not every ingredient needs a definition at all.
Ingredients so commonly understood that no definition is required — the AAFCO Common Food Index carries them — remain usable on the strength of being ordinary food. Carrots. Apples. Corn.
That pathway did not change when the MOU ended, and for anyone building a formula out of recognizable food rather than novel compounds, it is the one that matters most.
Guidance for Industry #293 was finalized October 23, 2024 and Guidance for Industry #294 on January 6, 2025. FDA guidance documents are non-binding and describe the agency's current thinking. Legal marketing of an animal food ingredient still requires an approved food additive petition or GRAS status for the intended use.