Do you buy your dog or cat food at PetSmart or Petco? These companies would have you believe that if you shop there that you are doing the best for your pet. However, both PetSmart and Petco carry grocery store quality brands of pet food. Before getting into that though, let's look at the good foods these stores carry.
PetSmart carries Blue Buffalo and By Nature Organics for dogs and cats. These are both fairly well formulated foods with meat as the main ingredients, however they are both priced on the high side and you can get better quality food for your money if you go to a privately owned feed store like H3 Pet Foods in Meridian, ID.
Petco offers a much better variety of quality foods. In addition to Blue Buffalo they carry Castor and Pollux Natural Ultramix and Organix, Dogswell (canned food), Halo Spot's Stew (with the exclusion of the dry foods which don't have enough meat), Natural Balance (the majority of the formulas), Only Natural Pet Fresh Freeze-dried formulas (not the EasyRaw variety, there's not enough meat in those), Pinnacle Holistic, Solid Gold, Variety Pet Foods Homestyle Recipe (only available in cans), Wellness Core and Super5Mix.
Unfortunately most of the Petco's only carry a select few of these brands in the store. You can however purchase most of them online through their website. The majority of these are also on the high side in terms of price, however if this is your only option for a pet store, you at least have some decent foods to choose from.
As for the bad, both PetSmart and Petco carry their share of the grocery store quality pet foods such as Pedigree, Purina (all the varieties), and Iams. They also carry the usual “veterinarian recommended” brands like Science Diet and Eukanuba, along with brands you can only get at pet stores like Nutro and Bil-Jac. All of these foods use ingredients like various meat by-products, grains like corn and wheat as the main ingredients, carcinogenic preservatives and of course the dreaded 4-D animals as a meat source. Not to mention that you end up having to feed a whole lot more of these foods because the nutrient quality in them is so low. So it's not as much of a bargain as you may think.
Now for the ugly, there’s nothing worse than a company that slaps words like “natural” and “nature” on their bags of food in addition to displaying pictures of cleanly cut raw chicken meat and vegetables when that doesn’t at all represent what they actually put into the formula.
For example, Purina Beneful is one of the biggest culprits of misrepresenting their dog food ingredients by what they display on the bag. They display a bunch of perfectly cubed raw red meat pieces, whole carrots, whole peas, and stalks of corn and wheat (at least they’ve got the grains kind of right). This looks like a very healthy food, judging by the bag. However, the first and third ingredients are corn. Corn is not what should be basing a healthy diet for a dog. Dogs need meat as the base of their diet because they are carnivores. Meat by-products make up the second ingredient. Those pictures of raw red meat definitely don’t represent by-products which are various organs and entrails, not muscle meat. Actual beef isn’t listed until the seventh ingredient. That hardly deserves a picture on the bag. What should be on the bag is pictures of ground yellow corn kernels, beef intestines and lungs, corn gluten meal powder, and beef tallow (rendered beef fat that resembles lard). That of course wouldn’t make a very “healthy” looking bag of food though, so no wonder they display what they do instead.
There are other foods that play by the same rules, like Eukanuba’s Naturally Wild (which is made up of mainly grains and potato), Iam’s Healthy Naturals (which is made up of mostly grains like corn and meat by-products from various sources), and Nutro Ultra (which is mainly made up of rice and corn).
There are always new pet foods coming to market that will advertise in the same deceptive ways. This is something everyone should be aware of when shopping for their animals. One of the main problems with shopping at “big box” pet stores is that they typically hire “fresh out of high school” students as well as people that just aren’t highly educated in pet food. When these people help you, they’re just spewing out what they’ve been told by the company representatives that come to the store. If Petco and PetSmart were as concerned as they pretend to be in their commercials, they wouldn’t be hiring non-experts and they certainly wouldn’t be carrying low quality foods.
Since you can’t count on most of the employees from these stores to recommend a good dog or cat food to you, just remember two things when browsing down those isles; read the ingredient labels on the back of the bag and don’t pay any attention at all to the front of the bag. It’s kind of like a reverse mullet, party in the front and business in the back!
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Comments
Thanks for the great info. Now I understand why good quality cat food like Innova EVO, Wysong Cat Food are not sold at these big name companies (except Wellness). Loved the article&bookmarked. Thanks!
I primarily buy foods from small shops that are very high quality but not found in big stores like this. I'm sure these two carry the grocery store brands so they can get that money. I always think it's silly when I see people buying that kind of food in those stores because they could buy it for much less elsewhere. Another great article!
I've worked for Petco for three years. And maybe the six stores I've worked at, four in California two in Florida, are not an accurate representation of Petcos nationwide, I don't know. However, no coworker I have ever had would promote anything less than the best. We can't help that the majority of sales is still in grocery brand foods (something like 85% of dog food sales), and I mean that literally. I have been called names and gotten formal complaints when I've suggested customers try a natural food. I'm not trying to claim that Petco is the best thing ever, but a blanket statement about not being able to trust most of the employees? Ouch.
That said, a lot of good information to be found here. I spend a lot of my time trying to talk people into better foods, and a lot of hours frustrated as I watch people buy Pedigree and then drive off in their BMWs. Unfortunately, who is the consumer going to listen to about Science Diet? Their vet, or a pet store employee?
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