Is Kirkland Good Food for Your Dog?

Let's Break It Down And See!

We know with the current economic climate, that many pet parents are looking for ways to cut costs and pinch a few pennies. That has prompted a lot of pet parents to look for alternative dog foods. Many pet parents have been asking us if Kirkland dog food is a good choice for their furry guy, so let's break it down and take a look! 👀

First things first! When it comes to pet food, the old saying "you get what you pay for" couldn't be more true! When we "save" money on the food, chances are good, we'll pay for it later at the Dogtor's office! Choosing to buy quality food for your furry family is truly making an investment in their health! We can save now and pay later, or we can invest in our animal's health and watch them enjoy a food they love, versus survive on a food that will not positively impact their health and could cause problems in the future. But what does that actually mean? When we take a look at what the bag is telling us, we can determine whether or not the food we're feeding is worth the cost of our pet's health. ✅

Maybe you've already assessed your pet's food, but if you haven't, you can always determine just how good or not so good your floof's food is with our easy to use Kibble Assessment Tool! Let's walk through assessing whether or not Kirkland is a good food for your dog! For easy reference, we've included their ingredient panel and we'll explain what we're looking at! 👇

First Ingredient

The first thing we'll look at is the first ingredient. We always want to see the first ingredient is a named protein. Because ingredients are listed in order of size, from most to least, we want to know without a doubt, the first ingredient is a named protein. That means we want to see, beef, lamb, salmon or some other type of named protein. We do not want to see mystery meat, otherwise known as 4D meat in the pet industry. If you see "meat" or "animal", we have no idea what that meat or animal is! It's a glaring red flag the manufacturer is using 4D meat, which could include roadkill, dead zoo animals, euthanized pets or diseased farm animals. 4D meat is known as "dead, diseased, dying or disabled" which means the animal was not ethically slaughtered for consumption.

Because we're feeding little furry meat eaters, we also don't want to see something other than a named protein as the first ingredient. Another glaring red flag in your pet's ingredient label is the first ingredient being anything other than a named protein. Seeing "corn, rice, beet pulp" or any other non-meat ingredient will tell you the majority of the food is a grain and will also mean the food is high in carbs! We'll get into carbs later in our assessment!

In Kirklands Adult Lamb & Rice formula, they list "lamb" as their first ingredient. So it looks like we're off to a good start! Let's keep looking to make sure we're feeding a good food! Manufacturers know, pet parents like you are doing their homework and want to see a named meat as the first ingredient, but they're also hoping that's where you'll stop! In order to understand the true quality of the food, we need to keep looking! 

Salt Divider

The next thing we want to do is find where "salt" is listed in the ingredient panel. The reason this is important is because, salt can only be 1% of the entire bag. Once we find where the salt is located, we want to see if the fruits and veggies are listed before or after the salt. If they fall after the salt in the ingredient panel, we know they make up less than 1% of the food. That means, if blueberries were after the salt, we'd be lucky if there were an entire blueberry in the bag. Fruits and veggies are not a required element in our pet's diets, but they add a ton of benefits through natural vitamins and minerals, so they are a great addition to any food. It's important to note, potatoes, peas and corn do not count towards our beneficial fruits and veggies, so regardless of where they're listed in the ingredient panel, you're not counting them as healthy fruits and veggies being added to the food.

In the case of the Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice formula, all of the fruits and veggies come after the salt. This is a cost cutting technique manufacturers use to make the claim of adding fruits and veggies, but the amount they add when they fall below the salt is insufficient for providing any really nutrients to the food. This would be considered a red flag if we find our fruits and veggies after the salt.

How is the Food Preserved

Ensuring our pet's food is preserved naturally is critical for their health. Synthetic preservatives like BHA, BHT or Ethoxyquin are harmful for our pets and are used in products like jet fuel, embalming fluid, lipstick and pesticides. There is science that supports the fact that these types of synthetic preservatives do in fact cause harm to our furry family members. This is why we need to ensure the preservatives used in our pet's food is natural. You want to see the food being preserved with ingredients like vitamin E, vitamin C, rosemary extract, mixed tocopherols or sprouted seeds. These are natural preservatives that will not negatively impact our pet's health.

Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice uses a combination of mixed tocopherols and rosemary extract to preserve their food. Two of the three things we've looked at seem to look pretty good! But we're not done yet! We need to keep investigating to truly assess the quality of this food.

Added Colour

Our pets do not care what colour their food is! Manufacturers who add colour to their food are doing that to appeal to our senses, not our pets. They are trying to make the food look more like human food. The problem is the colours being added are no different than paint being put in the food. Regardless of how they dress it up, colour added to the food is an unnecessary ingredient that poses a variety of problems to our pet's health. Colour can cause sensitivities, behavioural issues or allergies among many other issues we can avoid by simply avoiding any food or treats containing colour. You may see colour listed as Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, and Blue No. 2, though there is a growing trend to move away from these colours and manufacturers are opting for the less harmful sounding colour...they only sound less harmful, colours are still an unnecessary addition to any food. You may see carmel colour or more recently, manufacturers have started adding "coloured with vegetable juice" that definitely sounds better, but what vegetable? Vegetable juice doesn't tell us exactly what we need to know. Are they using spoiled supermarket vegetables to get the juice? Maybe, we can't know when all they tell us is "vegetable juice".

Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice does not add any colour to their food. Any food or treats that contain any type of added colour should be avoided as it is a completely unnecessary ingredient and a quality manufacturer will never add colour of any kind to their food.

What Are the Carbs

If you've been with us a while, you know we always want to avoid carbs in our pet's bowls. Many dry foods are 50-70% carbs. Our dogs and cats have no biological requirement for carbs, when they eat carbs, the carbs turn to sugar and sugar feeds disease. Looking for a protein rich, nutrient dense, low carb food is always best, especially when it comes to dry food. If we're feeding a dry food, we can not avoid the carbs and that is because we need starch in the food to hold the pellets in their shape. The starch used to form the food is what becomes carbs. Ideally we'd like to see carbs below 39%, the lower the better. Because our pets don't have a biological requirement for carbs, every carb we feed adds to what you're picking up in the backyard! It also means you're feeding far more than you need to!

Before I knew what to look for in a good food, I fed my two German Shepherds, Spencer and Madison the Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice. With two dogs, I was feeding 10 cups per day! I needed to buy a 40lb bag every two weeks and I thought that's just what you do when you have big dogs! I was wrong! Had I known then, what I know now, I could have fed them approximately four cups of a food like Carna4 rather then 10 cups of Kirkland. Spencer ate six cups and Madison ate four cups. If I had been feeding a food like Carna4, Spencer would have eaten about 2.5 cups and Madison would have eaten 1.5 cups. When we feed a quality food, we typically feed about 30-50% less.

The Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice formula has a carb percentage of 54%. That means more than half of everything you put in your dog's bowl is waste that you're picking up in the backyard! That is also the reason, Spencer needed six cups of Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice, where if he was eating Carna4, he would have only needed 2.5 cups. 

 

Knowing that carbs turn to sugar and feed disease, increase the likelihood of yeast growth, increase the chance of inflammation and do nothing to nourish our pet's bodies are some great reasons to always understand the carb count in your pet's food. Looking for food with quality ingredients, no fillers and no harmful ingredients will immediately help you improve your pet's diet!

 

To this point, we've done a pretty in depth assessment of the Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice, however, we need to look at three more things to complete our assessment and truly understand the quality of the food.

 

Ingredient Splitting

This is a sneaky little trick manufacturers use to push the more desirable ingredients higher up the panel and less desired ingredients further down the panel. We can spot ingredient splitting when we see the same type of ingredient multiple times in a row. In the case of Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice, we see:

 

"Lamb, Lamb Meal, Wholegrain Brown Rice, Ground White Rice, Rice Bran," this is an example of ingredient splitting. Wholegrain Brown Rice, Ground White Rice and Rice Bran are all rice! They are just processed differently. They have split out the rice to push these ingredients further down the panel and push the lamb and lamb meal higher up the panel. Remember, ingredients need to go in order of size from most to least on an ingredient panel. If for example the breakdown was as follows:

• Lamb 10%
• Lamb Meal 8%
• Wholegrain Brown Rice 7%
• Ground White Rice 7%
• Rice Bran 7%

If we put the rice back together, it makes up 21% of the food, where the lamb and lamb meal only make up 18% of the food. Technically, that makes this food a rice and lamb formula, not the lamb and rice formula they claim it is. If a manufacturer is splitting their ingredients, they're trying to hide something. If they're trying to hide one thing, you know they're likely hiding more!

 

Unidentified Ingredients

Just like we looked at in our first ingredient and throughout our assessment, we want to ensure there no unidentified ingredients. We need to know the source ingredient. Our animals lives depend on us trusting the people who make their food, not identifying certain ingredients is a quick way to lose the trust of pet parents!

 

In the case of Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice, they have listed "fish oil" as an ingredient. You've likely heard fish oil is a great addition to any diet and you'd be right! But in this case, who's the fish? What type of fish is this? Fish oil doesn't tell us what we need to know in order to feel comfortable with the type of fish oil being used. The source animal needs to be listed, if not on the bag, then on the manufacturer's website. If not there, we should be contacting the manufacturer to ask exactly what ingredients are being used. If they tell you it's "proprietary information", that's a red flag and you would be better off avoiding the product.

 

By-Products

By-products are considered the waste in the human food industry, meaning it is not consumable by people. Some folks may tell you by-products are completely nutritious for our pets but the problem is, we can't be sure of that! The reason we can't know by-products are nutritious with full certainty, is because by-products are considered nutritionally inconsistent. By-products can be made up of chicken crowns, gizzards, feathers or intestines, just to name a few inedible items that may make up by-products. The issue we face, is how many crowns, compared to how many intestines or feathers? By-products are not broken down to tell us what percentage is actually nutritious and what percentage is just slaughter room waste that can fill up a food!

 

Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice includes by-products in the form of "dried beet pulp". Now this isn't as gross as feathers and intestines, but it is still a by-product. Dried Beet Pulp is a by-product of the sugar beet industry, created after the sugar is extracted from sugar beets. What remains is a fibrous material that is dried and often used in animal feed, including pet food.

 

The Final Assessment

Now that we've done a thorough assessment of the Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice formula, we can see even though they seemed to start out strong, they stumbled when it came to hiding stuff deep in their ingredient panel. Our initial assessment is scored out of 50 points, but when we dig deeper, the food we're assessing can lose points for trying to hide things from us. As we mentioned earlier, we need to be able to trust the companies who make our pet's food, if we can't trust them, we cannot feed the food. Our pet's lives literally depend on it!

 

The Kirkland Adult Lamb & Rice formula originally scored 31 out of 50 points, when we looked deeper and found Ingredient Splitting, Unidentified Ingredients and By-products, they lost 10 points for each component, bringing their score down to 1 point out of 50 or a final grade of an F.

We started this assessment with an old saying of "you get what you pay for" and how it's never been more true than when we're talking about pet food. We couldn't buy 40lbs of meat for $50 for ourselves and we can't do it for our pets either. After diving deep into what this food actually is, we can now see we're not buying a 40lb bag of lamb, rather we're buying a 40lb bag of rice, with some unidentified ingredients and by-products. It makes a lot more sense why this bag is $50. The takeaway is that price can be a red flag when it comes to our pet's food and treats. If the price is too good to be true, it just might be! One exception to that rule is on prescription pet foods! They are extremely overpriced for what you're getting, but that's for another time!

 

If you're looking to save some cash upfront on your pet's food, there are definitely better options. Our pet's health should never be the price we pay to save money on their food and when the food we feed only allows them to survive rather than thrive, we're only temporarily saving money, because we'll end up spending it at the Dogtor with a food that doesn't properly nourish a meat eating carnivore's body! Our pet's health is an investment and so many pet parents like you have made that investment and we couldn't be more proud of you! If you ever have questions or need help choosing the best diet for your furry family, we're always happy to help!