Alternative Dog Food Options on Account of a Lady of No Importance.

Navigating Pet Food Choices

With so many options available today, choosing the right food for your pet can feel

overwhelming. Factors such as allergies, product recalls, picky eating habits, and specific health conditions can complicate the decision-making process. However, exploring the world of pet food can be an enlightening journey. To help simplify this process for pet owners, we’ve decided to share our experiences and insights.

Exploring Alternative Dog Food Options

If the thought of feeding your beloved companion kibble every day for the rest of their life is unappealing, you’re not alone. In this post, we will discuss various prepared food options that may better suit your pet's needs and preferences. We’ll cover:

• Fresh Dog Food: Understanding the benefits of fresh ingredients.

• Dehydrated Dog Food: How this option retains nutrients while offering convenience.

• Air-Dried Dog Food: Exploring the unique preservation method and its advantages.

• Freeze-Dried Dog Food: The process and benefits of freeze-drying for pet nutrition.

By the end of this post, we hope you’ll have a clearer understanding of these alternatives, empowering you to make an informed choice for your furry friend.

The names are great marketing, honestly.

Fresh food available on the market today is dog food that is typically human grade, sold refrigerated or shipped frozen. You then take it home, unpackage it, and freeze or refrigerate it yourself. This is followed by portioning it out and serving it daily to your dog. Options available are the ever popular and personalized The Farmers Dog, Ollie, Nom Nom, and endless others, just like the other kinds we're going to talk about today. The key difference here is we want to deliver our firsthand account to you of what the storage, preparation and overall every day and long-term use of what fresh dog food is like, along with the benefits of this kind of food.  

Fresh dog food can be great, dogs definitely seem to love it. The benefits we saw immediately were our dogs were much more interested in their food, as they were food snobs at the time. It was great seeing them excited at meal time. They also had improved energy and their coats were shinier. Fresh food is also more nutrient dense, which is the entire point of alternative dog food and deserves its own post, which I’ll make later.

However it can be a pain to store if you have multiple or larger dogs, as it does require a lot of freezer and fridge room. Shipping delays happen if you rely on that, it can sometimes result in spoiled food and a potential hassle with refunds and chat bots or phone trees. Fresh food can also make travel tricky when keeping traveling food at appropriate temperatures and cleaning up feeding bowls. Overall, it was not our favorite experience.

This is readily available at most chain stores and is an excellent baby step.

Next up is Dehydrated food. This is shelf stable dog food, that is rehydrated with water. Whole food ingredients are minimally processed as an alternative to high heat extrusion, which preserves more nutrients naturally. This is done using a slow and low heat process that results in a more palatable flavor and texture that dogs love, without compromising what they need: nutrients. You can buy this in stores, or have it shipped if that's your lifestyle. Some popular names available are Spot and Tango, Only Natural Pet, and on and on and on. The benefits are outstanding and we noticed an even bigger difference in our dogs coat and energy with multiple brands.

This was also great for shelf stability and didn't require a lot of storage. Pricing wasn't bad depending on which way you want to go brand wise. It's a good mid grade. The biggest disadvantage we found here was you get this kind of collective dust layer towards the end which leaves a lot to be desired texture wise if you're not pairing with a topper. Lots of dust overall, which seems like a small thing but it became our personal orange flag.

Then we have Air Dried food. Air dried food is an alternative using a slow dried process resulting in a texture similar to jerky and if you're this far down perhaps you've been anointed. You get shelf stability, you get nutrient density, you get texture and flavor. You can add some moisture for flavor, you can add mix ins, air dried food is the point of no return.

This also brings back the often overlooked dental benefits some folks run into with dehydrated or fresh food. Some popular brands available that haven't already been mentioned are Open Farm or Sundays. At this point we decided to lean more towards small and local brands and businesses.

This led to what we currently use in most of our dogs diet, Freeze Dried food. Absolute peak for shelf stability, light weight and convenient for travel and packaging. Freeze dried food also comes in hot with the natural texture and flavor locked in, which our dogs absolutely loved.

We buy this from a small local and family owned pet store. They don't sell to big chains.

You can feed this in its compact state with regular food and water, but we prefer to hydrate ours with warm water and add toppers to it, we'll share our favorites in a later post. Current brands you can find available are Stella and Chewy's, Vital Essentials, and our personal favorite, Primal Pet Foods.

We hope this post has been a gentle and enlightening journey on the types of alternative dog food available, and if you want our account of some of the brands we talked about, feel free to browse the linked posts that may or may not be available in the future. We wish the best for you and your pets!