What is more expensive: ingredients or marketing?

A friend recently asked me to look at a brand of raw dog food. The brand has very nice marketing and a fantastic website. The food is sold as an ultra premium food - it costs more than our Whoa Nelly! raw dog food.

It’s obviously amazing quality right? A quick look at the ingredient list tells a different story.

Firstly, it contains synthetic vitamins and minerals. Immediate red flag 🚩

Synthetic nutrients are not as bioavailable as real food. Your doctor would never recommend a diet of weetbix and vitamin tablets but that is what most commercial dog food is. This is how cheap food gets away with meeting a nutrient standard like AAFCO - by throwing synthetic supplements at it.

It is significantly better for nutrition to come from whole foods. It’s 100% possible to meet the nutrient standards using whole foods, it just takes formulation skill and better quality ingredients. 

Moving down the ingredient list, it only gets worse.

How much is actually in the food?

Listed after the vitamin mix was salmon, coconut oil and several other “premium” ingredients. Sounds great - except that a synthetic vitamin will essentially weigh nothing. It will be less than 1% of the food by weight.

Which means there is less than 1% salmon (etc) in the food. These ingredients are listed in name only. They are not there in a meaningful way.

It looks great to see nice functional ingredients on a product label, but they won't improve your dogs health if they are in minuscule amounts. Ultimately the price tag for this brand reflects the quality of the packaging, not the food inside.

Some foods are very cheap with very expensive marketing.

While that thought is a bit depressing, it's not that hard to figure out what is actually nutritious and good for your dog.

Here’s how:

❌ No vitamin or mineral supplements

❌ No avoid anything containing ingredients you can’t but at a supermarket

✅ Meets the AAFCO or NRC nutrient guidelines

There is obviously more to it (ingredient quality, fat balance etc), but if you can get these 3 things right you are doing great 🐾