Best Healthy Dog Food

There’s not a consensus amongst vets on what is the healthiest dog food. In fact, most vets only do a couple of days worth of nutritional training as veterinary degrees focus more on surgery and intervention than how their bodies process different ingredients.

Some vets sell certain brands which have been positioned as ‘medically-suited’ dog foods, however as you’ll see when you compare dog food, they generally treat the symptom and not the cause and aren’t good value in our opinion. We’re a little biased though 😉

The Australian dog food market is so fragmented that it’s almost impossible to pick a healthy food for dogs, with nearly a hundred options across wet, raw, fresh and dry dog food. Scratch has the best dog food reviews in Australia, with 4.9 out of 5 average rating after feeding over 20,000 dogs.

Our 3 kibbles are on the super-premium side of things, but with premium prices. We use just about as much meat as anything out there, and it’s all sourced from the human-grade supply chain rather than the bits and pieces the pet-food supply chain uses.

And then we balance our recipes properly. We don’t have the same cost constraints of most brands so we use higher quantities of the more nutritious ingredients. A lot of grain-free dog foods swap grain fillers for grain-free fillers that are just as harmful in the long-term. Most of our veggies are whole and far less processed. It equals a healthier, more delicious kibble than what you’ll find on the store shelves.

The other key reason people switch to Scratch is trust. We don’t want to be the biggest but we’re hellbent on earning the privilege of being Australia’s most trusted dog food. It all comes back to why we started it, so we’ve launched a few things that we think all dog foods should do:

1. Our recipes show you how much we use of every ingredient so you know truly what’s in it.
2. We only use specific ingredients (turkey instead of poultry for example, or salmon oil instead of fish oil). Dog food often changes batch to batch but it’s important to us that your food never changes, or that there’s a good reason if they do.
3. We have public changelogs of any changes ever made to our recipes, and give customers a heads up ahead of time if we ever do decide to tweak them. A lot of pet parents use Scratch because their dog struggles with particular ingredients so this helps people make the most informed decisions for the life of their dogs.
4. We donate 2% of all revenue to charity and have the most ambitious sustainability program in the market. We use natural resources with meat and farmed veggies, so it’s important to recognise that doing business comes at a cost to the planet in some small way. So we donate from every order to climate action and now also to some amazing dog welfare initiatives focused on early prevention of dogs needing a second home.
5. We publish everything we do on a transparency front and advocate loudly for it so that the rest of the industry falls into line. We’re only small, but if we can pressure the big guys into implementing even 25% of what we do, it’d be a huge win for consumer transparency. I truly believe dogs would have a longer life from better decisions made through it.

Learn more about how we do things and our ethics.

Most things are OK in small quantities, however dogs should avoid foods that are high in starch, corn, wheat and rice. Most grain-free dog foods tend to be healthier, however this isn’t always the case.

Legumes and lentils contain an enzyme that is harmful for dogs when eaten raw, but is destroyed in the cooking process.

There are quite a few social media posts that blame Peas (pea protein, pea flour, pea starch) for impacting fertility in breeding dogs, but Chick Peas are very different to Peas.

When included in their whole form (including husk and the full nutrition) rather than processed, legumes are far more nutritious than other dog food ingredients like potato starch, wheat or rice.