meatpoint.io calculator — custom ingredients
If you like to easily calculate fully balanced meals for your pet, but your pampered ‘little lord’ or ‘princess’ has their own needs and favourite flavours — it’s time to take our calculator to the next level. This involves using additional ingredients. In addition to choosing 2 meats, 2 offal cuts and liver, meatpoint.io allows you to add any ingredients from our database.
Let me start by saying that using custom ingredients requires you, as a cat or dog keeper, to have some knowledge and experience regarding your cat’s needs and habits. You probably already know a thing or two about this — take a look at our practical examples of how to use various homemade ingredients, and you’re sure to find something suitable for your pet.
🐟 Fish and Whole Prey 🐁
Homemade ingredients allow us to add, for example, meat, fish or Whole Prey (rodents, birds, fish) to vary our cat’s or dog’s diet. If we choose such an additional ingredient, it’s best to recalculate the recipe without it first. Check how much meat is in the recipe and only then add fish/WP, entering the amount, e.g. at 20% of the meat. Then we recalculate again and we have a varied recipe. ;)
♻️ Zero waste
At this point, we can also add any leftovers from our previous BARF meal. For example, the remaining 30 g of turkey liver, and select a different type of liver currently available in the shop in the ‘liver’ field, so that the calculator works out exactly how much more we need to buy.
🥩 Third and subsequent cut
of meat
What if you want to add some variety to your BARF diet with extra meats that aren’t meant to form the basis of your mix, but simply as a supplement – for example, because venison has appeared in the supermarket but is outrageously expensive? You don’t need to create a recipe specifically for venison; you can buy a piece and add it to your own ingredients, and the calculator will work out the recipe using exactly the amount you’ve bought.
Or perhaps you have 124 g of stomachs or pork loin left over from your last BARF meal – this is where you can enter them. Bear in mind that once raw meat has been frozen, we do not allow it to thaw completely, but maintain the so-called cold chain — you can read more about this in our e-book “Barfna Kuchnia”. Alternatively, we can par-cook it (see: the article on BACF) before freezing.
⚖️ Balancing lean meats
Sometimes you might want to create a mixture using two lean meats, but the calculator is unable to calculate the correct protein-to-fat ratio. In that case, you can add a little fat (lard, tallow, chicken skin, etc.) to the additional ingredients, and the calculator will allow you to choose any second meat (by default, the choice of the second meat is limited to pair a fattier meat with a leaner one). Note! This ‘semi-manual’ adjustment may require a few attempts to provide the right amount of fat to balance the meats, which will supply the necessary missing calories.
An easier option is to use lard or another fat as meat #2 — in that case, lean meat is usually easy to balance out, but the resulting mixture is obviously less varied.
💊 Additional supplements
We can also add all sorts of supplements as extra ingredients. For example, our furry friend really likes yeast, but we’ve used chicken liver and there’s no yeast in the recipe? No problem – we can add it manually as an extra ingredient, and meatpoint.io will ensure we don’t exceed any limits. We just need to remember not to add anything ourselves in quantities that would make the mixture unpalatable. We can also monitor the recipe audit and check how our additional supplements affect the nutritional values.
🧪 Even more extra supplements
We also have a few non-standard supplements in our database which aren’t essential for achieving nutritional balance, but serve as functional additives. These include New Zealand green-lipped mussels, spirulina, chlorella, and some krill-based products, which have too low a content of omega-3 fatty acids to qualify as omega supplements. Is there anything missing? Post on our Facebook group, and we’ll add it if it’s a good idea ;) You can find out more about functional supplements on YouTube.
When choosing supplements as additional ingredients, it is worth consulting the audit.
🔼 Upgrading specifications
If we want to increase the moisture content of the mixture, raise the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio (Ca/P), or add more liver or yeast, these custom ingredients will also help us achieve this. The easiest way is to calculate a standard recipe to get the initial amount of an ingredient (water, calcium supplement, liver or yeast). Then, add a quantity greater than the one automatically calculated — as an additional ingredient. Everything remains safe — the calculator always checks the full list of ingredients, including those we’ve added. In this way, we can increase moisture to 83% 💧 or raise the Ca/P ratio to 1.75 🦴, almost double the amount of liver, and fine-tune the percentage of offal to the nearest percentage point (you should set a lower percentage of offal than the target value when adding the ingredient with its weight). If we want to achieve a specific value, we need to check the levels in the audit report.
✔️ What is an audit?
Below, meatpoint.io presents an analysis of the recipe, i.e. a checklist of all the micro- and macro-nutrients in the mixture. First and foremost, it is important to remember that if the recipe is incorrect, the calculations simply won’t work out. Each micro- and macro-nutrient is calculated to achieve its optimal amount, in accordance with standards we have adopted based on scientific research and those set out by the NRC, AAFCO and FEDIAF (i.e. scientific organisations that provide the basis for legal regulations regarding the nutrition of companion animals). However, the algorithm allows for a safe margin above and below this optimum, so that nutrition balanced with meatpoint.io is always safe for healthy animals 👌
For example: for a 4-kilogram cat with an average calorie intake, the programme calculates the optimal taurine level at 1316 mg and will aim for this value, based on recommendations that the minimum in the diet is around 650 mg (depending on the source), and on the basis of safe intake levels, setting a range from 650 to 2632 mg. However, if we were to manually enter more taurine than calculated in the recipe, meatpoint.io would only allow us to add the supplement up to the established upper safe limit.
🔐 It is worth noting that, for safety reasons, the audit mechanism is independent of the algorithms used to balance the blend (double check). This means that the finished blend, including all its ingredients—including additional ingredients—is audited, and any recipes that do not meet safety requirements will not be presented.
As a result, the audit provides information such as ‘reduced potassium levels’ — but this does not mean that this particular mix is bad. It means that it certainly provides sufficient amounts of the nutrient in question, but in future it is worth checking whether this comment appears again in the audit. If it does, it is worth reading the guidance and, in future, ensuring that, at least in some of the recipes, the potassium in the example is ‘in the green’.
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Remember that if you have any questions or technical issues with the calculator, you will surely find assistance in our Facebook group (English posts are welcome!). We encourage you to join it, as well as to follow our social media channels, where you will find a wealth of useful knowledge :)
You can also contact us directly at support@meatpoint.io
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