What You Should Know About "Cold Pressed" Liquid Collagen for Dogs

I'm going to call out a claim I keep seeing from some of the liquid collagen sellers for dogs.

They say their collagen is "cold pressed."

One of them puts it like this: "Liquid is cold-pressed—up to 98% gets absorbed." Another says powders are "heat-processed, which destroys up to 80% of the collagen."

Here's my problem with that.

You can cold press an olive.

You cannot cold press collagen out of a cowhide.

In this article I'm going to show you exactly how collagen peptides are made, step by step, with the temperatures. Then you can decide for yourself whether "cold pressed collagen" is even possible.

What "cold pressing" actually means

Cold pressing is a real thing. It's just not a collagen thing.

It's how you get oil out of olives, seeds and nuts, and juice out of fruit. You squeeze, and the liquid that's already sitting inside the plant comes out. No heat, no solvents.

The international food standard for vegetable oils (Codex, whose members include both the US and the UK) describes cold pressed oils as made "by mechanical procedures only... without the application of heat." For olive oil, UK and EU law goes further. You can only say "first cold pressing" if the oil was pressed below 27°C.

So that's the bar. Squeezing. Below 27°C for olive oil. A liquid that was already there.

Keep that in mind.

Where collagen actually lives

Collagen isn't a liquid sitting inside a cowhide waiting to be squeezed out.

It's a solid, structural protein. It's the tough, fibrous scaffolding that holds skin, bone and cartilage together. In its natural state, its fibres are tightly bound and cross-linked, and until it's processed into collagen peptides, it won't dissolve in water.

If you squeezed a cowhide as hard as you like, you'd get water, fat and blood. The collagen would be what's left in your hand.

The gelatin manufacturers' own industry handbook says gelatin "does not occur free in nature." It has to be made, by breaking collagen down. Collagen peptides are the next step on from that.

How collagen peptides are actually made

This is the process the industry itself describes. Whether the collagen ends up in a powder, a gummy or a bottle of liquid, this is how the collagen peptides start life.

1. Clean and soften the raw material.

Hides and bones are cleaned and soaked to loosen the collagen. Cattle hide and bone typically sit in lime for 8 to 12 weeks.

2. Extract it with hot water.

The softened material is washed through several rounds of hot water. The first round starts at 50 to 60°C, and each round runs hotter, with the last close to boiling.

That's the step that releases the collagen. And it's already double the temperature of a cold pressed olive.

3. Cut it into peptides with enzymes.

Enzymes are added to chop the long collagen chains into much smaller pieces, called peptides. This runs warm too, around 60°C in published studies.

The original collagen molecule is huge, around 300 kDa. The finished peptides are typically 3 to 6 kDa. That's roughly 50 to 100 times smaller. That's the whole point. "Hydrolysed" literally means broken down.

4. Heat it again to switch the enzymes off.

Once the job's done, the liquid is heated, around 90°C, so the enzymes stop working. One of the world's biggest collagen makers describes this in its filing with the US FDA: the solution is "heated to inactivate any residual hydrolysis enzyme."

5. Filter, sterilise and dry.

It's filtered, concentrated, sterilised (often by UHT, the same quick high-heat step used for long-life milk) and spray dried into a fine powder.

That's it. That's how collagen peptides are made.

Notice what's missing? Pressing. There's no squeezing step anywhere. And there's heat in almost every step.

I've looked for a commercial way to make collagen peptides without heat. I couldn't find one in any process description, from any manufacturer or any study.

So what was "cold pressed"?

Good question. I'd genuinely like to know.

Here's the bit that matters. If a liquid collagen lists hydrolysed collagen or collagen peptides on its label, that ingredient went through the process above. Hot water, enzymes, heat.

The most a liquid product could truthfully mean by "cold" is that the finished peptides were mixed into liquid without heating it. Collagen peptides dissolve easily in cold water. The makers advertise that.

But stirring a powder into water isn't cold pressing. It's mixing.

"Heat destroys up to 80% of the collagen"

This one deserves evidence. I haven't been able to find any.

Neither the 80% figure nor the 98% figure comes with a source on the pages where I've seen them.

And think about what hydrolysed collagen is. It's collagen that's been deliberately broken down using heat and enzymes. That's how it's made. You can't "destroy" its structure with heat, because removing that structure is the point of the process.

The makers design collagen peptides to hold up to heat. One of the largest collagen peptide makers in the world publishes data showing its peptides holding up through UHT sterilisation and even baking at 180°C. That's their own data, not an independent study, but it's the opposite of "80% destroyed."

"Liquid is better absorbed"

Liquid and powder describe the format of a supplement. Neither one decides how well the collagen gets absorbed.

I looked for a study, in people or in dogs, that compares liquid collagen with powdered collagen. I couldn't find one.

What I did find: in human studies that measure how collagen peptides get into the blood, the powder is simply dissolved in water before it's taken. The differences researchers found came from things like the source of the collagen and the size of the peptides, not whether it came out of a bottle or a bag.

However they're taken, liquid or powder, the peptides end up dissolved in the gut.

Putting collagen peptides in a bottle doesn't automatically make them more absorbable. And I've seen no evidence that it does.

What I'd ask instead

So rather than asking "is liquid better than powder?", I think the better questions are:

• What collagen am I actually giving my dog?
• How much of it is in each serving? Is it on the label?
• If a product says "cold pressed," what exactly was pressed?
• If it quotes a percentage, where's the evidence?

Any brand that's confident in its product should be happy to answer those.

That second question matters more than most people realise. I've looked at how much collagen is actually in a typical serving of liquid dog collagen in Cheap Liquid Dog Collagen Supplements: What Are You Really Getting?

Where Pawable stands

We don't claim our collagen is cold pressed, because collagen can't be cold pressed. Ours is made the way collagen peptides are made, and we're happy to say so.

Pawable is hydrolysed collagen peptides, plus UC-II®, in a simple daily powder you add straight to your dog's food. It's designed to support healthy joints, mobility and comfort as part of their everyday routine. It's made in a GMP-certified facility.

If you're curious, you can try it for 90 days with our 90-day money-back guarantee.

No cold pressing. No questionable percentages. Just collagen, and the honest story of how it's made.

Sources

1. Codex Alimentarius, Standard for Named Vegetable Oils (CXS 210-1999). Definition of cold pressed oils. https://www.fao.org/input/download/standards/336/CXS_210e_2015.pdf
2. UK olive oil marketing rules, Regulation 29/2012, Article 5 (legislation.gov.uk). "First cold pressing" below 27°C. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2012/29/article/5
3. EU Delegated Regulation 2022/2104 (EUR-Lex). Same 27°C rule in the EU. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022R2104
4. Gelatin Manufacturers Institute of America, Gelatin Handbook. Liming time, hot-water extraction stages and temperatures, "does not occur free in nature." https://nitta-gelatin.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/GMIA_Gelatin-Handbook.pdf
5. Gelatine Manufacturers of Europe, How gelatine is made. https://www.gelatine.org/en/gelatine/manufacturing.html
6. León-López A. et al. (2019). Hydrolyzed Collagen: Sources and Applications. Molecules. Collagen structure, 300 kDa, 3–6 kDa peptides, denaturation above 40°C. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6891674/
7. Review of fish collagen extraction (PMC7601392). Collagen insolubility; enzyme inactivation around 90°C. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7601392/
8. Woo et al. (2023). Enzymatic hydrolysis at 60°C (laboratory study). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10236160/
9. Rousselot, FDA GRAS Notice (2017). Heat inactivation, sterilisation and spray drying in commercial manufacture. https://www.fda.gov/media/110032/download
10. Gelita, Collagen Peptides technical brochure (manufacturer data). Process flow including UHT and spray drying; heat stability of peptides. https://www.gelita.com/sites/default/files/2025-10/peptides_technik-broschuere_2019_16p_eng_a4_web.pdf
11. Virgilio N. et al. (2024). Frontiers in Nutrition. Human absorption study; collagen powder dissolved in water before dosing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11325589/