I ran across this thread while using Google to try to find an alternative to Avi-Cakes; the hit was due to the mention of discontinuing the Avi-cakes. My Ziggy is addicted to Avi-cakes, and I have been buying them 20 pounds at a time for years, but lately they seem to have gotten soft and mushy (they don't stick together as well), so I checked the ingredient list (for the first time in years) and got some surprises:
ground corn, canary grass seed, white proso millet, hulled oats, wheat flour, sugar, soybean meal, ground limestone, dicalcium phosphate, canola oil, whole egg, corn gluten meal, propylene glycol, cane molasses, gelatin, glycerine, iodized salt, L-lysine, L-methionine, choline chloride, citric acid, mixed tocopherols, manganese oxide, zinc oxide, vitamin A, vitamin D3, vitamin E, menadione, niacin, calcium dipantothenate, riboflavin, thiamine, pyridoxine, vitamin B12, folic acid, biotin, ascorbic acid, and selenium.
Avi-Cakes for Parrots also contain crack corn (as the 3rd ingredient), and peanuts and red millet (as the 8th and 9th ingredients). Avi-Cakes for Cockatoos & Macaws also contain cracked corn (#3), peanuts (#9), and red millet (#10).
(emphasis mine.)
I don't remember white sugar being one of the main ingredients when I first started buying Avi-cakes, but, these days, there's more sugar than molasses in all 3 types: it would be more correct to say that they are sweetened with molasses-flavored sugar than with just molasses. I like blackstrap molasses because of the high vitamin and mineral content, although I would worry about the iron content in the case of softbills.
The non-whole grain wheat flour as an ingredient doesn't surprise me; most people don't know any better regarding their own food. What did surprise me, even more than the white sugar content, was propylene glycol. Lafeber lists
more propylene glycol than molasses in all three of its Avi-cake varieties. I could understand using a trace amount, but that seems like a lot to me. Propylene glycol, in case you are wondering, is used in modern antifreezes because it is much less toxic than its chemical cousin, ethylene glycol. As a human food additive, it is generally recognized as safe. It is
NOT considered safe for cats, but I find numerous references to propylene glycol as
"practically" non-toxic to birds, whatever "practically" means. It is safe enough that it is actually used to administer medication to treat air sack mites in birds, but I don't like the idea of it being a constant in my bird's diet. I don't have any propylene glycol in
my kitchen--although I do have powdered biotin and a few other uncommon pantry items that get added to almost everything, just in case Ziggy gets a bite (fat chance that he would ever miss out.)
I tried to find out how Avi-cake ingredients have changed over the years to see if my memory is faulty or if I didn't pay attention at the time, but I have no old packaging to compare. All I found online was that various vendors seem to be using old ingredient lists. The ingredient lists on Lafeber's website is quoted above, but the Foster & Smith website, amazon.com, ebay, and a few other vending sites, are all different for the identical Avi-cake product. I'm hoping that other vendors are not selling Avi-cakes from some other century, in which case the posted ingredient lists might be accurate, but I would speculate that various vendors have merely not updated their advertising, and are selling using information from earlier incarnations of Lafeber products. (One Godsend about the Avi-cakes is that there is a "best by" date on them.) We all know, of course, that the company has been "improving" its products.
Is there an update on this thread somewhere? Did discontinuing the Avi-cakes help?