Pet
Food
Review

Product review - Natural Dog Food Company

The Natural Dog Food Company products have been around in one form or another for several years. They differ from most natural pet foods in that they do not have a vitamin and mineral mix added to the recipe, and the company state that despite this the product can still be classified as complete, based upon the ingredients used.

There's a range of products covering puppy to senior and where possible they use UK sourced ingredients. The range is naturally preserved, using similar antioxidants to other natural products, contains a mix of cereals including brown rice, and in most of the range they use both meat meal and fresh meat. From a protein and fat point of view these are on the low side, similar to Burns at 20% and 8.5% respectively for the adult foods, so they would be ideal for a dog which had problems maintaining body weight, or needed to lose a few pounds.

Having tried a bag of the chicken variety with my dog I can report that palatability seems good (the overiding smell is brewers yeast rather than chicken, but that doesn't bother my dog!)

Expect to pay around £45 for a 15kg bag, which is slightly cheaper than Burns, another high quality natural food, but more expensive than others (Whites Premium is currently £36.99/15kg).

Let's look at the Adult Chicken recipe

Chicken meat meal (min 22%), Fresh chicken (min 21%), Brown rice (min 21%), Oats, Mixed vegetables and herbs (min 8%), Barley, Refined chicken oil, Sugar beet, Linseed, Brewers yeast.

Now I looked at this and thought 'Wow, 43% chicken!' and put the product in a similar catagory to Orijen which is high in meat content and low in cereal. But then I looked at the protein content of 20% and realised that all was not as I thought. And of course it's the fresh chicken, which is actually high in water. If you convert the wet chicken to dry then overall the chicken content is similar to other natural foods.

Then there's the cereals. Brown rice is very close to being the second ingredient, but if you add up the brown rice, Oats and barley then you would have cereals as the first ingredient.

So what we have is a cereal based dog food with a single source of protein, naturally preserved (as with most natural foods) but minus the added vits and minerals.

If you are looking for a lowish protein/fat natural dog food, and aren't bothered by the lack of added vitamins and minerals then this could be worth a try - it is certainly palatable though a bit more expensive than some.