Nutrition

How to choose the best food for your dog

A shop shelf or a web page: dozens of brands, catchy claims, prices ranging from a few euros a kilo to restaurant-level figures. Working out which food is truly best for your dog is one of the most important — and most confusing — decisions for anyone who loves them. The good news is that, with a few clear criteria, you can learn to tell a good food from a mediocre one without being led by advertising alone.

Let's establish one fixed point right away: there's no single "best food" that's right for every dog. There's the best food for that dog, based on its age, size, activity level and state of health. What follows is a method for choosing well, whatever your dog is like.

1. Always start with the label, not the packaging

The images of steaks and fresh vegetables on the front of the pack say nothing about the real quality. The information that matters is on the back, in the ingredient list and the analytical constituents. Learning to read them is the single step that does the most to improve the quality of your choices.

The ingredient list is ordered by weight: the first names are the most abundant. A good sign is finding a clearly identified meat source ("beef", "chicken", "turkey") at the top rather than vague wording. Conversely, watch out for:

• Generic "animal by-products", without specifying which: they point to raw materials of variable, untraceable quality.
• Cereals and carbohydrates as the first ingredients, a sign that the proportion of real meat is low.
• Endless lists full of codes: often the longer and more obscure the list, the less clear it is what the dog is really eating.
• Added colourings, flavourings and sugars, which serve to make a product palatable, not to nourish it better.

2. Check the analytical constituents (and the word "complete")

Below the ingredient list you'll find the analytical constituents: percentages of crude protein, fat, fibre, ash and moisture. You don't need to be a nutritionist, but two things are worth a look: that the protein content is appropriate for the dog's life stage, and that the ash (the mineral fraction) isn't excessively high, an indirect sign of lower-grade raw materials.

Above all, make sure the food is declared "complete" and not "complementary". A complete food is formulated to cover the dog's entire nutritional requirement on its own; a complementary one has to be combined with something else. Confusing the two is one of the most common mistakes and leads to unbalanced diets even when you start from good products.

3. Match the choice to age, size and health

The "right" food changes with the dog in front of you:

• Puppy: needs a food specifically formulated for growth (puppy/growth), richer in energy and with the right calcium/phosphorus ratio.
• Adult: a complete, balanced maintenance food, portioned so the dog doesn't gain weight.
• Senior: often calls for more digestible formulas, with an eye on weight and joints.
• Dogs with intolerances or a sensitive stomach: here simplicity wins. A single-protein diet, with one animal source and few ingredients, reduces the variables and helps you understand what the dog tolerates well.

When a medical condition is present (kidneys, liver, diagnosed allergies, significant overweight), the choice of food should always be agreed with your vet, who can recommend specific diets.

4. Kibble, wet food or fresh food: pros and cons

The format isn't a minor detail: it affects digestibility, hydration, palatability and convenience. None is "the best" in absolute terms, but knowing their limits helps you choose with awareness.

• Kibble (dry): convenient, long-keeping, inexpensive. The downside is that it's heavily processed food (extruded at high temperatures) and low in water, and quality varies enormously from product to product.
• Canned wet food: palatable and rich in water, useful for dogs that drink little. It should, however, be chosen with the same attention to the label, because here too there are poor products.
• Cooked fresh food: combines recognizable ingredients, good palatability and high digestibility thanks to gentle cooking, such as steam-cooking. Historically its limitation was convenience (fridge and freezer); today there are cooked, packaged options that stay stable at room temperature, removing the problem.

5. Be wary of a price that's too low (and of one that's too high)

Quality has a cost, but a high price guarantees nothing on its own: you're also paying for marketing and packaging. Likewise, a very cheap food can hardly contain premium raw materials. The most honest yardstick isn't the price per kilo, but the cost per meal relative to the quality of the ingredients and to how much food it takes to genuinely satisfy and nourish your dog. Sometimes a denser, more digestible food costs less than it seems, because you need less of it.

Our take: real food, one protein at a time

It's precisely from these criteria that Pappa Fresh was born: single-protein recipes (beef, chicken, turkey, horse or pork), with recognizable human-grade ingredients, steam-cooked to preserve the nutrients and complete and balanced because they're formulated by a veterinary nutritionist. All in a format that stays shelf-stable, without the hassle of a freezer. If you'd like to see how these principles translate into practice, take a look at the Pappa Fresh recipes.

In short

Choosing the best food for your dog isn't a matter of brand or price, but of method: reading the label with a preference for clearly identified meats, checking the analytical constituents and the word "complete", matching the choice to age, size and health, and understanding the pros and cons of kibble, wet food and fresh food. With these criteria you stop relying on advertising and start choosing based on what actually ends up in the bowl.