Finding The Best Dry Pet Food Can Be Tricky
If you've gone down a rabbit hole or two on Google, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube on what to look for in a great pet food, you're probably exhausted! Searching for the best dry food diet for you pet can be tricky especially when you get pulled in a million different directions! The good news is, we make sure to do that legwork for you so you can shop with confidence knowing you're always feeding a diet that will pawsitively impact the health of your furry family! 🩵
We also know that you may not always be able to get to us, especially if you're traveling with the floofs and a wise man once said, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime!" We want to teach you how to fish, metaphorically speaking of course...we want to teach you how to choose a great dry food for your furry family so when you can't pop in to pamper your floof, you're still providing tasty yums that are good for them too! 👍
You've likely heard us talk about food we recommend and food we don't recommend. You may have also heard us say we do extensive research on any brand we bring in to ensure it meets or exceeds our standards! We apply a set criteria to assessing any food we bring in so we can know without a shadow of a doubt that it will work to extend the lives of our furry VIPs. We want you to know and understand the preliminary standards we apply when looking at food so you can do the same thing and always make sure you're feeding a quality diet to your furry guys! 👇
Dry Food
The majority of pet parents still serve their furry family a dry food diet (kibble of some sort) and if we're going to be serving a dry food, then we need to make sure it's a premium option. Why? Because kibble is the most processed food we can feed our furry guys. So traditional dry food is similar to you and I eating nothing but McDonald's our entire lifetime. Premium dry food options are like us choosing a sub over a greasy burger and fries. The sub is still processed, but we can see what's in it and we can improve the sub by adding fresh food like a veggie plate, a fruit cup or a glass of milk. We can do the same for our furry guys when we start with a premium option then make it better! So how do we choose a premium dry option? Here's what to look for! 👇
🥩 A named protein should be the first ingredient. This is typically an indication of a quality food. Seeing anything other than a named source of meat as the first ingredient means the majority of the food is made up of that ingredient. Ingredients are listed in order of size from largest to smallest on the panel with the first ingredient making up the majority of the food.
🧂 Find the salt! Flip the bag over and see where salt is listed in the ingredient panel. Salt can only make up 1% of the entire bag, so finding the salt is important because we want to ensure all of the beautiful fruits and veggies pictured on the front of the bag are listed before the salt! If the fruits and veggies are listed after the salt, we'd be lucky if there was one whole blueberry in the entire bag.
🎨 Be sure there are no added colours in your pet's food. These will be listed in the ingredient panel as well. If you see Red, Blue or Yellow dyes this is an indication of low quality food. Food manufacturers are getting sneaky and have also started using Carmel Colouring, we never want to see any colours added to the food. Colour being added to the food is essentially paint and it's harmful for our pets. They do not care what colour their food is, those colours are being added for our benefit to try and make the feed, look more like food.
🌱 Be sure it's preserved naturally. If you see "preserved with BHA, BHT or Ethoxyquin", it is not a high quality food. These synthetic preservatives are used in items like jet fuel, embalming fluid, pesticides and lipstick. They are harmful for our pets. Look for preservatives such as vitamin E or C, or Rosemary extract as a method of preservation so we know the food is preserved naturally.
🪄 Watch for a little trick manufacturers use called Ingredient Splitting. Pet food manufacturers know the higher up a desired ingredient is on the ingredient panel the better the food looks. Ingredient Splitting is a little trick they use to make food look better than it actually is. For example, if you see "brown rice, white rice and rice bran" listed as three separate ingredients, that is Ingredient Splitting. Brown rice, white rice and rice bran are all rice and are making up a much bigger portion of the food than the manufacturer wants you to believe.
🍞 What are the carbs? You already know our dogs and cats have no biological requirement for carbs. When they eat carbs, carbs turn to sugar and sugar feeds disease. As much as possible, we want to reduce or eliminate starchy carbs from our pet's diets. Traditional dry food typically is made up of about 50-70% carbs. That means for every two cups of food in the bowl, your furry guy's body is only using about one cup and you're picking up the rest in the backyard!
We want to know what the carbs are and we have an easy Kibble Grading Tool that you can use to make sure you are serving a Grade A kibble. This is where you can see how to calculate your carbs!
If we're serving a dry food diet, we only want to serve a premium dry food that is protein rich, nutrient dense and low carb. Assessing your food to ensure it meets these standards will allow you to be confident you are serving your pet a quality dry food! Stay tuned to future blogs when we tell you what to look for in freeze dried foods and fresh raw food diets! Not all pet food is created equally and that goes for all types, not just kibble! 👍
We made a promise to you when our doors opened that we would only carry the best of the best for our furry VIPs and that means we need to do our due diligence when it comes to the food we bring in. If we wouldn't feed it to our own furry guys, we would never recommend it for yours. That isn't just something we say, that is the honest to goodness truth because we are on a mission to empower pet parents and extend the lives of pets through nutrition. If you ever have questions or need help choosing the best food for your pet, we are always happy to help! If you have questions but don't live in our city, we offer consultations over the phone you can book right from our website! 🩵