Years Dog Food Recall: All Fresh Meals Pulled After Reports of Sudden Dry Eye in Dogs

In short: Years has recalled every fresh meal it sells after 57 reported cases of sudden dry eye in dogs. Stop feeding it now. Check your dog's eyes for redness, squinting, pawing or thick discharge, and ring your vet if you see any of it.

Years, the UK fresh dog food subscription brand, has voluntarily recalled its entire range of fresh meals after reports of dogs developing sudden dry eye in both eyes at once.

The recall was sent to customers by email on the evening of 17 August 2026. Floofers received it directly as a Years customer, and when we first published this piece there was no notice on the Years website and no coverage anywhere else.

Years has since put a public recall notice on its site at years.com/pages/care, linked from a banner on its homepage. It confirms the email and adds a considerable amount of detail, including that the Food Standards Agency and Trading Standards were both advised before the recall was issued. We have updated this article throughout to reflect it.

Everything below that is attributed to Years is quoted from that notice or the customer email.

What Years Has Said

Years says it has been reviewing "a number of reports of dogs developing sudden, bilateral dry eye" and launched a formal investigation working with customers, vets, specialist advisers and independent laboratories.

The conclusion so far:

"Our investigation has identified a potential link between buckwheat, a common ingredient in dog food, and these cases."

On the decision to recall before that link is confirmed:

"Ultimate confirmation will come with laboratory testing, but we've taken the precautionary decision not to wait, and voluntarily recall all Years fresh meals with immediate effect."

On the scale:

"To date, this has affected just 0.1% of our customers, 57 suspected cases of dry eye reported through our customer support channels as of 16th August, with the majority reported after the 12th."

Years adds that it accepts there will be cases that were never reported to them, that "even one case is one too many", and that it would welcome funding an independent study with the veterinary and ophthalmology community.

Correction. When this piece first went up we noted that 57 cases at 0.1% implied a customer base of roughly 57,000, and flagged it as our arithmetic rather than a Years figure. The published notice gives the real number: approximately 40,000 customers year to date, which puts 57 cases at closer to 0.14%. Our inference was wrong and we have removed it.

What still stands from those figures is the timing. The majority of reports arrived after 12 August. A cluster that tight in a four day window is what usually forces a company's hand, and Years itself cites "rising case numbers" as part of the reason it recalled on the 17th. The number is unlikely to have stopped moving.

Which Products Are Affected

All of them, on the meal side. From the recall notice:

• Every Years fresh recipe contains buckwheat, at between 6.3% and 7.2% depending on the recipe
• That covers puppy, adult and senior meals
• Breed Health+ supplements are not affected. They contain no buckwheat
• Treats and other products are not affected

One detail that has not had much attention: Years describes the reformulation as "returning to super seed, quinoa" and says it will "return our recipes to the formulation our customers knew before the change". Buckwheat was not a longstanding ingredient. It was a recipe change, and the recall reverses it.

What You Should Do Right Now

Years' instructions to customers are:

1. Stop feeding Years dog food.
2. Do not feed the meals to any other dog or animal.
3. Do not donate or sell the meals.
4. Subscriptions were paused automatically on the night of 17 August, for an initial six weeks.
5. Years will arrange free collection of unused meals and apply a full credit to your account for the order.

Two things from the published notice that were not in the customer email and are worth knowing:

• The credit is not limited to your current order. Asked whether customers who have already fed several buckwheat boxes are owed credit for all of them rather than just the latest, Years answers with a single word: "YES". If you have been a customer for months, that is a materially bigger sum than the email implied.
• There is a direct address for affected dogs. Years says it is contacting everyone impacted, but if you have reported a case and heard nothing within 72 hours, it gives care@years.com.

We would add four things to that list.

Check your dog's eyes properly, tonight. Not a glance. Get them under a decent light, look at both eyes, and look again in the morning. Bilateral onset is the pattern here, so a dog with one gunky eye and one clear one is a different question from a dog whose eyes have both gone dull and sticky over a few days.

Photograph the meals and the packaging before collection. Batch codes, best before dates, the lot. Once Years collects the food, you have handed over the only physical evidence you had. A phone photo costs you nothing.

Write down when your dog started on Years and when symptoms began. If this ends up in front of a vet, an insurer or a lawyer, a dated note written this week is worth far more than a memory in six months.

Do not wait and see. Dry eye is progressive, it is painful, and the difference between catching it early and catching it late can be the difference between managed and permanent. If you are unsure whether what you are looking at counts, that is exactly the point at which to ring the vet.

What Years Knew, And When

The published notice includes a timeline, and it is the most revealing part of the document.

• Reports arrived at first "within a range that did not initially indicate an unusual pattern"
• Late July: Years begins receiving multiple reports of sudden bilateral dry eye
• 1 August: an independent vet and RCVS Specialist in Small Animal Clinical Nutrition advises that, on the case data available, "it is highly unlikely that there is any link between the feeding of Years foods and the occurrences of dry eye in dogs", but that Years should investigate anyway
• Years commissions UKAS-accredited laboratory testing across meals and Breed Health+ supplements, covering heavy metals, mycotoxins, alkaloids, pesticides and veterinary drug residues, and appoints a root cause analysis specialist and a toxicologist
• After 12 August: the majority of the 57 cases are reported
• 17 August: Years recalls

Two things stand out. The first is that the expert advice on 1 August pointed away from the food, which is the sort of thing that can slow a company down for a fortnight, and Years is candid that customers may have found the pace "frustratingly slow".

The second is who moved it. Years explicitly credits the customers "who set up Facebook groups, who pushed, and who demanded answers", saying their advocacy gave the company "the ability to properly challenge our advisors". That is an unusually direct admission that the owners got there before the process did.

Dry Eye In Dogs (KCS): What It Actually Is

Dry eye's proper name is keratoconjunctivitis sicca, almost always shortened to KCS. It means the tear glands are not producing enough of the watery part of the tear film.

Tears are not just lubrication. The cornea has no blood supply of its own, so it takes oxygen and nutrients from the tear film, and tears also flush out dust and bacteria. Take the tear film away and the surface of the eye is left inflamed, exposed and painful. The body compensates by producing thick mucus instead, which is why the classic sign is sticky discharge rather than a visibly "dry" eye.

Left untreated, KCS leads to corneal ulcers, then to scarring and pigment spreading across the cornea. That pigment does not go away. It is the mechanism by which dry eye takes a dog's sight.

Most canine KCS is immune mediated and comes on gradually, often in predisposed breeds such as West Highland White Terriers, Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Pugs, Shih Tzus and English Bulldogs. It can also follow certain medications, some infections, or damage to the nerve supply. What is being described in these reports is different in character: sudden, in both eyes, in dogs of any breed.

Our full guide to dry eye in dogs covers the tear test, the treatment, what it costs to manage long term, and the one thing you must never put in a dog's eye.

Symptoms To Check For

What you might see	What it usually means
Thick, sticky, yellow or green discharge that keeps returning	The eye is producing mucus to compensate for missing tears
Redness in the white of the eye and the inner lids	Inflammation from an unprotected surface
Squinting, excessive blinking, holding an eye half shut	Pain
Pawing or rubbing the face on carpet and furniture	Irritation, and a route to further damage
A dull, lacklustre or cloudy look to the eye surface	Loss of the smooth tear film, or early corneal change
Both eyes affected at once, over days rather than months	The pattern reported in this recall

If you see these, ring your vet, ask for an appointment promptly, and say the words "Years recall" when you book. It changes what the vet is looking for.

What The Vet Will Do

The test for dry eye is quick, cheap and non invasive. It is called a Schirmer tear test: a small paper strip is tucked inside the lower lid for 60 seconds and the vet reads how far the tears wick up it. Anything under 15mm per minute is abnormal, and under 5mm is severe. Your vet will usually also stain the eye with fluorescein dye to check for ulcers.

Treatment is normally a ciclosporin or tacrolimus ointment that suppresses the immune attack on the tear glands and pushes tear production back up, alongside artificial tears and sometimes antibiotics if there is an ulcer. It often works well. The catch is that it is usually for life, and stopping tends to mean relapse.

That makes cost a genuine factor. Ciclosporin eye ointment is a long term prescription, so it is worth knowing that vet prescription fees are being capped at £21 from later this year, and that you can take a written prescription to a VMD registered online pharmacy rather than buying at the practice. If your dog is insured, read our guide to UK pet insurance before you claim, because how a chronic condition is recorded at diagnosis affects cover for the rest of your dog's life.

Is Buckwheat In Dog Food Dangerous?

This is the question that will be searched most in the next week, so it deserves a careful answer rather than a scary one.

Buckwheat is not a grain. It is a pseudocereal, related to rhubarb and sorrel, and it turns up widely in grain free and hypoallergenic dog foods precisely because it is normally well tolerated. There is no established body of evidence that buckwheat causes eye disease in dogs, and no regulator has said so.

What Years has said is that its investigation found a potential link, and that confirmation still depends on laboratory results. That leaves several possibilities open. It could be the ingredient. It could equally be something that arrived with a particular supplier or batch, a contaminant, a storage problem or something introduced in processing. Buckwheat is a known host for certain mould species, and mycotoxins are a recognised route to systemic harm in pet food, though nobody has said that is what happened here and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Our position: follow the recall to the letter, because that is about the specific product. Do not throw out an unrelated food because it lists buckwheat on the label. If your dog eats something else containing buckwheat and has no symptoms, there is nothing in the public record to act on.

The Part Worth Saying Plainly

Recalling an entire range on a suspected link, before the lab confirms it, is the right call and a costly one. Years deserves credit for making it quickly rather than quietly monitoring the numbers for another month.

The communication is weaker where it turns to reassurance. "Just 0.1% of our customers" is a strange framing to put next to 57 dogs, and offering "a thank you gift, for your patience" in the next box lands badly against owners who may be facing a lifelong medication bill and a dog with reduced sight. Years also says the reformulated recipe will swap buckwheat for quinoa in six weeks, which presumes the answer to a question its own lab has not yet answered.

Three gaps remain in the published notice.

Nothing at all for people who bought it in a shop. Years is stocked by retailers including Pets at Home, Just for Pets and Pets & Friends. Every remedy in the notice is a subscription remedy: the automatic pause, the account credit, the collection. Someone with a Years pack from a shop shelf gets no instruction, no route to a credit, and no reason to have seen the notice at all.

Nothing on veterinary costs. The notice says Years will "help however we can" and asks affected owners to get in touch, but it makes no commitment to cover diagnosis or treatment. Dry eye is frequently a lifelong medication cost, and that is the question affected owners will actually be asking.

Advice against precautionary checks. Asked whether a symptom-free dog should be checked, the notice says there is "no need". A Schirmer tear test takes 60 seconds and costs very little, and the defining problem with dry eye is that its early signs get dismissed at home as a gunky eye. If your dog has been on the food and you are near a vet appointment anyway, we would ask for the test rather than not.

To Years' credit, it has now committed to publishing the final investigation results, and the FSA and Trading Standards were notified before the recall rather than after. That is the right shape. The follow up is what matters now: the independent study should actually be funded, and the findings should be published whichever way they go, including if they clear buckwheat.

If Your Dog Is Affected

Take it in this order.

1. Vet first. Appointment, Schirmer tear test, mention the recall.
2. Keep everything. Invoices, clinical notes, photos of the food and packaging, dates.
3. Tell Years. Report the case through their support channel even if you have already seen a vet, because the case count is how the scale of this gets understood.
4. Check your insurance before the condition is formally recorded, and ask your vet to note the dietary history.
5. Do not sign anything that settles a claim while your dog's prognosis is still unknown. Early KCS and established KCS with corneal pigment are very different outcomes.

If you want to be better prepared for the vet visit itself, our guide on what to ask your vet covers the questions worth having ready.

What We Have Asked Years

We have put questions to Years and will publish their response in full. Their public notice, which went up after we first published, has since answered several of them.

Answered by the published notice:

• A recall notice is now live on years.com, linked from the homepage
• The FSA and Trading Standards were both advised before the recall was issued
• The case count stands at 57, from approximately 40,000 customers year to date
• Every fresh recipe is affected, at 6.3% to 7.2% buckwheat. Supplements and treats are not
• Years will publish the final investigation results

Still outstanding:

• Whether the recall covers the Years range sold in shops. Every remedy in the notice is a subscription remedy. Years is stocked by Pets at Home, Just for Pets and Pets & Friends, and nobody buying it off a shelf has been given a route to a credit or a reason to have seen the notice
• Whether Years will cover veterinary costs, including the ongoing medication that dry eye usually requires
• Over what production period the affected meals were made, and whether owners can identify stock by batch code or best before date
• What the investigation ruled out before it arrived at buckwheat
• Whether the six week quinoa timeline is conditional on the laboratory results, and what happens if the results do not implicate buckwheat
• Whether Years will fund the independent study, as opposed to welcoming one

If you bought Years in a shop rather than by subscription, the first of those is the one that affects you, and there is still no answer to it.

We Will Update This Page

This is a developing story and we will keep this page current as it moves.

Things we are watching for: any Food Standards Agency or Trading Standards alert of their own, a revised case count, the laboratory results, an answer on retail stock, and any statement from the veterinary ophthalmology community.

Update log

• 18 August 2026, third update: Years has published a public recall notice at years.com/pages/care with a homepage banner. Article updated throughout. We have corrected our earlier arithmetic on customer numbers: we inferred roughly 57,000 customers from the 0.1% figure, and the notice gives approximately 40,000. Added the Years timeline, the confirmation that the FSA and Trading Standards were notified before the recall, the fact that credit covers all previous buckwheat boxes rather than just the current order, and that supplements and treats are unaffected.
• 18 August 2026, second update: Questions put to Years by email, with a response requested by 5pm on Thursday 20 August. We will publish their answer in full.
• 18 August 2026: Story published. Recall confirmed via customer email dated 17 August. No public notice from Years and no regulatory alert at time of publication.

Floofers is not a veterinary practice and nothing here is a diagnosis. If you are worried about your dog's eyes, speak to your vet. If your dog is in obvious pain, treat it as urgent.