2024 Best to Worst Pet Food - What Grade is Your Kibble?
If you're feeding a dry food, how do you know if your kibble is good for your pet? You may have seen our dry food reviews in our Beyond the Bag Playlist on TikTok, or you may have seen our video reviews on Instagram or Facebook! You may also have done the research yourself and used our easy kibble grading tool, What Grade is My Kibble, found at the bottom of every page on our website! Whichever way you choose, being sure you're feeding a premium dry food is paramount to your pet's health! 🐾
One of the most common questions we got from our review series was "can you make a list of the food reviews" and we heard you! We have compiled our 2024 Best to Worst Dry Pet Food List so you can easily see if the food you're feeding is a Grade "A" dry food. If your food isn't on the list, you can assess your food with our kibble grading tool or keep an eye on our socials for more reviews! 🤩
So let's dive in and take a look at the criteria we used to assess the foods we looked at in 2024 so you can understand how the grades are being assigned. 👍
1️⃣ Where's the meat? We want to see the first ingredient in any dry food is a named protein. Anything other than a named protein will lose points and degrade the quality of the food.
2️⃣ Where's the salt? Salt can only be 1% of the bag which is key for us to determine if we're just paying extra for fruits and veggies being added or if they're actually providing some benefit to our furry family! Once we find the salt, we look to see if fruits and veggies are before or after the salt. Because an ingredient panel lists ingredients in order of size, from most to least, if fruits and veggies are listed after the salt, we'd be lucky if there was an entire blueberry in the bag because anything listed after salt is less than 1%. Prescription diets are the exception to the rule! Salt can be more than 1% but that's done solely to make the animal thirsty so they eat the food, get thirsty and drink more to flush their organs.
3️⃣ How is it preserved? We never want to see our pet's food preserved with synthetic preservatives. Synthetic preservatives are harmful for our pets, so ensuring their food and treats are naturally preserved is key!
4️⃣ No colour is a good colour! We do not want to see any added colours in our pet's food and treats. They do not care what colour their food is. Manufacturers who are adding colour are doing so in order to appeal to us! They're trying to make their kibble look like "people food" but they do this at the cost of our pet's health by adding dyes, which is essentially putting paint in our pet's food.
5️⃣ How many carbs are in the bowl? Our pets have no biological requirement for carbs. When they eat carbs, carbs turn to sugar and sugar feeds disease. More carbs also means more waste for you to pick up! The furry guys bodies do not use carbs, so we feed more because their body doesn't use the portion of the kibble that is made up of carbs.
6️⃣ Dig in deep! Pet parents like you are looking a lot closer at the food you're feeding your pet! Pet food manufacturers are hoping we stick to only looking at the first five ingredients and that's why they hide things further down the ingredient panel. There are three things we're looking for because we're looking at the whole panel, not just the first five ingredients!
a. Are they splitting their ingredients? Manufacturers use this sneaky little trick to make the food look better than it actually is. When they split ingredients, they are pushing more desirable ingredients higher up the panel and less desired ingredients further down the panel. If you see the same type of ingredient in a variety of formats, for example: brown rice, white rice, rice bran, that's all rice and the manufacturer is splitting their ingredients.
b. Are they clearly identifying all of their ingredients? We always want to see the source of the ingredient. That means we don't want to see "meat, bone, vegetable, fish" unless the manufacturer has clearly identified on their bag or website what the unidentified ingredient is, we don't actually know what they're putting in the food and that's a problem.
c. Are they using by-products? By-products are considered the inedible waste of the human food industry and not consumable by humans. If we shouldn't eat it, then our pets shouldn't either. The bigger problem with by-products, is they are nutritionally inconsistent. That means, we don't really know how much of the by-product is made up of feathers, versus crowns or intestines. If the majority of the by-product is feathers, there's not a lot of protein coming from the by-product and we're feeding a bowl full of feathers.
This list of what we're looking for and why, may look a little daunting, but it's extremely easy to grade your own kibble by visiting our easy grading tool which you can find here! Once we start looking at each of these components, we can assign a score to how the food stacks up. With our final score we can assign a grade to ensure we're only ever feeding a Grade "A" kibble. If your kibble isn't listed below, you can grade your own kibble or stay tuned for more kibble reviews in 2025!
If your kibble did make it to our 2024 Best to Worst Dry Pet Food List and you want to see exactly how we got to the grade, you can always pop over to our TikTok Playlist, Beyond the Bag and watch the quick video to see how your kibble stacks up!
2024 Best to Worst Dry Pet Food List
