What are you considering to be fillers exactly?

 

Corn and wheat. I thought that was the general consensus around here.

I'd go with Pro Plan, personally. You could definitely supplement with eggs, salmon, chicken, whatever you'd like.

As to pricing ... Acana is more expensive than bottom of the barrel Walmart kibble, and I'd recommend people pay the extra if they can afford it, but a lot of pricing is just marketing.

For example, my husband has a friend who runs his own recording studio. When he first opened, he charged $25/hour to try to lure in clients, everyone else charged $75/hr. Nobody came. He raised his prices to $100 an hour- $25 more than anyone else was charging- and couldn't keep up with all the bookings he was getting. People think things that are expensive are better, and that's true(ish) to a point, but it can just be a marketing thing.

That last point is so true! I did something similar at a grocery store I worked for. I decided to give my customers a break when I got a really good deal on cast iron skillets. Most places charged $12 for them and I decided to sell them for $7.99. NO ONE bought them, the things sat for weeks, so I made a sign, On Sale Now, and upped the price to $9.99. they flew off the shelf . It really isn't the deal you are getting but the deal you think you are getting.

@Garmin, breed specific food is a marketing gimmick, a dog is a dog and a lab does not have different nutritional needs then a maltese. If your dog is into dog sports or is very active, then ti may be helpful to look for a food with higher calories and more protein and fat. Puppy food, especially large breed puppy food is useful, senior food is kind of useful but it depends on the dog.

Yeah that's what I was thinking, ignorant people regarding dog nutrition like myself willing to go an extra mile for their pup's health are the perfect prey for this kind of gimmick. I'll probably stick to Pro Plan plus some home cooked meals to complement it. Hopefully we will eventually get something decent like Orijen, Acana or even Blue Buffalo available in our region.

 

I'd go with Pro Plan, personally. You could definitely supplement with eggs, salmon, chicken, whatever you'd like.

As to pricing ... Acana is more expensive than bottom of the barrel Walmart kibble, and I'd recommend people pay the extra if they can afford it, but a lot of pricing is just marketing.

For example, my husband has a friend who runs his own recording studio. When he first opened, he charged $25/hour to try to lure in clients, everyone else charged $75/hr. Nobody came. He raised his prices to $100 an hour- $25 more than anyone else was charging- and couldn't keep up with all the bookings he was getting. People think things that are expensive are better, and that's true(ish) to a point, but it can just be a marketing thing.

 

That last point is so true! I did something similar at a grocery store I worked for. I decided to give my customers a break when I got a really good deal on cast iron skillets. Most places charged $12 for them and I decided to sell them for $7.99. NO ONE bought them, the things sat for weeks, so I made a sign, On Sale Now, and upped the price to $9.99. they flew off the shelf . It really isn't the deal you are getting but the deal you think you are getting.

@Garmin, breed specific food is a marketing gimmick, a dog is a dog and a lab does not have different nutritional needs then a maltese. If your dog is into dog sports or is very active, then ti may be helpful to look for a food with higher calories and more protein and fat. Puppy food, especially large breed puppy food is useful, senior food is kind of useful but it depends on the dog.

Out of the brands you listed I'd go with Eukanuba or Pro Plan, I don't think it would be worth it to pay the extra for Royal Canine and get very little for it.

It's find to supplement and both Salmon and eggs would be good to add. You can also add stuff like fish oil, coconut oil, real meat, low salt broth (it's easy to make your own).

 

Blue Buffalo isn't actually all that great. It's comparable to something like Iams in my opinion. Step up from no-name, gets the job done, but nothing more than average at best.

I am a person who stays far away from highly commercialized brands because usually you're only paying a high price because they need something to fund the fancy packaging and TV ops.

My favorite brands, that I tend to recommend are GO, Now and Merrick. Go and Now are both Petcurrean brands and cater to different needs of the dog. GO has higher protein content and more for sporting needs, whereas Now is more of an everyday food (imo).

I personally feed my dog Merrick though. It's locally made, and doesn't import ingredients from China. I really like what I see on the ingredients list too. My dog does amazing on it. Good poops, good energy, soft shiny coat... and it doesn't agitate his allergies at all!

Links: http://www.petcurean.com/ & http://www.merrickpetcare.com/

 

I agree that a lot of it is marketing. For a while there was a dog food that was sold as the best, and it was supposedly made of BEAVERS, and not any beavers, beavers that had to be removed for environmental issues (daming up rivers that were causing issues, or too large of a beaver population, etc), so these were 'wild, holistic, 100% organic beavers' and it was supposed to be nothing but beaver meat.

The dogfood was recalled. Note that this alone isn't a black-mark. A lot of the major dogfood companies have had occasional recalls from time to time. The problem was this dogfood was recalled for having tainted rice gluten from china.

WTF! It's supposed to be all beaver! So it's not like the company was just shopping around for the cheapest rice gluten to use in regular dog food and happened to get a bad batch. They were putting in ingredients that were totally contrary to what the label stated...which was 100% 'holistic' beaver meat, no grains, no potato, etc etc.

the truth is these small producers of dogfood aren't big enough for any regulating body to worry much about if they have any accuracy at all as far as what they claim to be putting in the food and what they are really putting in the food. Most aren't any special formulas developed by anyone with knowledge of dog nutrition, there are no feeding trials...there is simply a guy with a plan, a marketing department, a graphis department who designs a nice label in conjunction with marketing, and then they subcontract out the making of the dogfood to companies who specialize in making giant batches of dogfood and putting specialty labels on it.

BTW the brand whose hollistic beaver food was recalled was Canine Caviar who even after getting caught in this blatant lie, continues to get rave reviews for being hollistic and organic for their slightly more mainstream offerings (stuff like holistic dogfood made only from ducks, pearl millet, flaxseed, and other ingredients that sound good...but may or may not actually be in the food).

Side note: Feeding beaver isn't actually unusual. It's fairly common in the dogsledding world, but this is more related to it being cheap meat they buy from trappers and people who raise beavers in beaver farms for their pelts, because there isn't much other use for beaver meat.

 

You are just wealth of information

 

There are differences in the types of ingredients used

There are differences in the type of ingredient used. Many used really nasty ingredients that fails inspection, fillers etc. Unfortunately there is no way to tell which is better than the other. Thus you can pay for a premium brand and get crappy stuffs.

If you want to supplement a dry kibble meal, please use lots of meat, probiotics like yogurt, and oil (salmon oil, coconut oil). Because these are all the essential needs which is most expensive or unstable to be available in most kibbles.