Years Fresh Dog Food Recall: What the KCS Link Means for Your Dog

On August 19, 2026, Years posted to social media asking owners to stop feeding its fresh dog food immediately. No press release, no official regulatory notice yet. Just a social media post, and a potential link to keratoconjunctivitis sicca (KCS), commonly called dry eye, in dogs who'd been eating the food.

That's an unsettling way to find out.

If you're a Years customer, here's what you need to know. And if you're not, this one is still worth paying attention to, because the story of how dry eye presents in dogs is something most owners would miss until it's already caused damage.

What Years Actually Said

The recall is voluntary and self-initiated. Years hasn't confirmed causation, only that it's investigating a potential link between its fresh meals and reported KCS cases. The company's advice as of August 19 is to stop feeding the product while the investigation is ongoing.

There's no FDA involvement announced yet, no specific batch numbers published (at time of writing), and no confirmed count of affected dogs. That last part is worth sitting with. We genuinely don't know how many dogs are involved, which makes it hard to assess risk with any precision. What we do know is that KCS is not a minor issue. Left untreated, it causes chronic pain and can permanently damage the cornea.

If you have Years food in the house, stop feeding it. Contact your vet, especially if your dog has shown any eye-related symptoms recently.

What KCS Actually Looks Like

This is where a lot of owners get caught out. Dry eye doesn't announce itself dramatically. A dog with KCS isn't usually pawing frantically at its face or keeping an eye shut. The early signs are easy to write off.

Things to watch for:

• Thick, sticky, or yellowish discharge from one or both eyes (different from normal sleep crust)
• Dull or cloudy-looking eyes rather than the usual bright surface
• Frequent blinking or squinting in normal light
• Redness around the eye or on the white of the eye
• The dog rubbing its face along the floor or against furniture

The discharge is often the most distinctive sign. Normal eye discharge is watery or a little crusty when dry. KCS discharge tends to be mucoid or mucopurulent, meaning it has a stringy, sticky, sometimes greenish quality. If you're seeing that and your dog has been eating Years food, get to a vet rather than waiting to see if it clears up.

KCS is diagnosed by a simple test called a Schirmer Tear Test, which measures tear production in millimetres per minute. Under 15mm/minute is considered low; under 5mm/minute is severe. It takes about a minute to run and most practices can do it in a routine appointment.

Why Diet Could Theoretically Affect Tear Production

It's not obvious why food would cause KCS, and Years hasn't explained its hypothesis publicly. But there are a few established mechanisms worth knowing about.

Certain medications, particularly sulphonamide antibiotics, are a well-documented cause of drug-induced KCS in dogs. The theory is that they interfere with the lacrimal gland tissue that produces tears. Whether a food ingredient could act through a similar pathway isn't something I can answer, and it's what Years is presumably trying to work out right now.

There's also the question of nutritional deficiencies. Vitamin A plays a role in maintaining the mucous membranes of the eye, and severe deficiencies can contribute to ocular surface problems. Again, that's not an accusation aimed at Years specifically, just context for why diet and eye health aren't as unrelated as they might seem.

The honest answer is: the mechanism is unclear, and it may turn out there's no causal link at all. But the company decided the reports warranted stopping the product, and that's probably the right call given what's at stake.

What to Do Right Now

If you've been feeding Years fresh dog food:

• Stop immediately, as the company has advised
• Check your dog's eyes today, in good natural light, and look for the signs above
• Book a vet appointment if you see anything unusual, or if your dog has been showing any eye discomfort you'd previously brushed off
• Keep hold of the packaging in case batch information becomes relevant to the investigation
• Follow Years' social channels directly for updates, since that's where the initial notice came from

If your dog is showing symptoms and you've been tracking them, having a clear record of when they started and what they looked like will help your vet enormously. Tailo's health monitoring and episode tracking can be useful here, particularly for behavioural signs like face-rubbing or increased squinting that you might have noticed but not formally logged.

The Broader Point About Fresh Dog Food

Fresh and raw dog food has had a complicated few weeks. The Oma's Pride recall for Salmonella risk was announced on August 17, just two days before the Years news. Two recalls in a single week, covering different product types and different risks, is a reasonable prompt to look at how you're keeping up with product safety information generally.

The FDA's recall database is searchable and updated regularly. If you're feeding any commercial fresh or raw diet, bookmarking it and checking occasionally is not paranoid, it's just sensible.

Fresh food isn't inherently more dangerous than kibble, but it does tend to operate with smaller production runs and faster ingredient turnover, which can make tracing a problem quicker in some ways and messier in others. The Years situation, where we have a social media notice but no batch numbers yet, illustrates the messier version.

More information will come out. Whether it confirms a link, exonerates the food, or lands somewhere ambiguous in between is genuinely unknown right now.