Buckwheat, contamination, and why the difference matters

WHAT HAS HAPPENED

In August 2026, Years voluntarily recalled its fresh meals after customers reported dogs developing sudden bilateral dry eye — known clinically as keratoconjunctivitis sicca, or KCS. In their most recent update, Years reported that 192 customers had come forward with potential eye issues, from a base of around 40,000, and described those reports as not yet verified.

Years has said its investigation is currently focused on possible contamination within part of its buckwheat supply, rather than on buckwheat itself, and that a definitive cause has not yet been established. Laboratory and toxicology testing is ongoing.

We’ve used their framing word for word rather than speculating past it — we don’t have access to their data, and nor does anyone outside that investigation. What we can do is explain why that framing — contamination, not ingredient — is the scientifically meaningful one.

THE CONTAMINANT IS NOT THE INGREDIENT

Almost every food safety incident you can name follows the same shape. Spinach linked to E. coli. Peanut butter linked to Salmonella. Maize-based dog foods linked to fatal aflatoxin poisoning. In none of those cases was the food the problem. The problem was something that arrived with it.

It’s worth knowing that dry eye in dogs has well-documented pharmacological causes. Sulphonamide antibiotics are the classic example: they can damage the tear-producing lacrimal gland, sometimes permanently, and this is established in the veterinary literature. We are not suggesting that is what happened here — nobody has established a cause. We raise it to make a point about mechanism. Injuring a tear gland takes a biologically active molecule doing something specific to that tissue. A seed does not do that. A contaminant might.

WHY WE USE BUCKWHEAT

Despite the name, buckwheat isn’t wheat and isn’t a cereal grain at all. It’s a pseudocereal — the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a relative of rhubarb and sorrel — and it is naturally gluten-free. It has been eaten by people and fed to animals for centuries, and is a common, approved ingredient across the pet food industry.

We include it for three reasons.

Protein quality. Buckwheat has an unusually well-balanced amino acid profile for a plant seed, and is a comparatively good source of lysine — the amino acid most often limiting in plant proteins.

Fibre that reaches the right place. Buckwheat brings both resistant starch and fermentable fibre. That fibre is food for the microbial populations in the large intestine, which ferment it into short-chain fatty acids — butyrate in particular, the preferred fuel for the cells lining the colon. This is gut nutrition in its most literal sense.

Plant diversity. Different plants carry different fibre structures and different polyphenols, and feed different members of the microbial community. Buckwheat contributes rutin, a flavonoid it is particularly rich in, alongside magnesium and manganese. A gut fed on three plants is not the same as a gut fed on twenty.

That is the honest reason it’s in our formulation. It earns its place.

“BUT I’VE READ BUCKWHEAT IS TOXIC TO DOGS”

If you search for this, you’ll find buckwheat on toxic-plant lists, and the concern behind that listing is real but specific. The buckwheat plant contains fagopyrins — light-sensitive compounds that, in sufficient quantity, can cause photosensitisation. Fagopyrism is a documented problem in grazing livestock that eat large amounts of the growing plant: the leaves, stems and flowers, where these compounds are concentrated. It is not a feature of the dehulled, milled seed used in food. And it presents as skin inflammation on sun-exposed, unpigmented areas — not as bilateral dry eye.

DOSE, AND WHY IT ISN’T THE MAIN POINT

Toxicology’s oldest principle is that the dose makes the poison. Almost any ingredient fed in excess can become a problem — as true of liver and vitamin A as of anything else.

The recalled Years recipes contained buckwheat at around 7%. Ours contain less than 0.5%. If a contaminated batch of any ingredient ever did reach a production run, a fourteen-fold difference in inclusion is a meaningful difference in exposure.

But we want to be straight with you: that is a margin, not a safeguard. Low inclusion is not why our food is safe. Testing is.

HOW WE TEST

Our ingredients, buckwheat included, are tested before they are used. Every batch arrives against a written specification and supporting certificates of analysis, and we screen for the contaminant classes described above rather than assuming a clean supplier stays clean. We also analyse finished food after production, because what matters is what ends up in the bowl, not what was intended on the spreadsheet.

We commission independent work on our food too, including digestibility testing at the University of Bologna and amino acid analysis through accredited laboratories — and we will keep doing all of it whether or not there is a news story running.

We will also say plainly if we ever find something. A brand that tests properly will occasionally reject an ingredient. That is the system working, not failing.

IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS

We would rather answer them than have you worry quietly. We’re very happy to share more about our formulation, our ingredient testing and the evidence behind our approach, in as much detail as you’d like. Email us at [email protected] and we’ll talk you through it properly.

Sources: Years product recall updates (years.com, updated 9 September 2026); Omni, “Dry Eye in Dogs: What Owners Need to Know”; veterinary literature on drug-induced keratoconjunctivitis sicca in dogs.