Dogs need meat - they cannot obtain all the essential amino acids from vegetable or cereal based foods.
Cheap supermarket foods are generally based on wheat (and it's not the lovely ears of wheat you can see glowing in the fields but the left-overs of the human food chain) - wheat is very difficult for a dog to digest and results in the majority of the bag of food being excreted in large piles around the garden - you may think that you are getting value for money with a big bag BUT have you considered that you have to feed 3 times as much of the cheap food than you would of a quality food? So what is better - a 15Kg bag from the supermarket at 23€ or a 15Kg bag of quality food at 67€ - obviously the quality food - better for your dog, cheaper for you, less vet visits and more waggy tails!

Price alone does not make a quality food though! There are some very high priced foods that, when the ingredients are investigated, are not really that good and a lot of these come from large companies with very large marketing budgets that have to be paid for out of the price of a bag.

Manufacturers spend thousands on consultants to massage the ingredients lists to make their food sound better than the competition and there is an immense difference between foods that include either "Chicken", "Chicken Meat", "Chicken Meal" or "Chicken Meat Meal". Remember that the ingredients lists are legally enforceable and are therefore the only thing about the bag of food that can actually be relied on. A food that lists an ingredient of "20% Chicken" is likely to have less than 1% of Chicken Meat and the rest is made up of water (which can be 75% of the 20%), intestines, heart, lungs, skin, bone, sinews and even some odd beaks and feathers.

We have started a section for reviews of various brands of dog food.
You can find this under "Dog Food / Dry / Dog Food Reviews" on the main menu.

If your current food is not listed and you would like us to cast a eye over it then please send us the name of the food and the list of ingredients just in case we can't find it on the Internet. For the really bad foods it is unlikely that these will be easily available.