Orijen Adult Formula Dry Dog Food

Review by Q. Hunt for Orijen Adult Formula Dry Dog Food
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I have a 8.5 month old Aussie mix. She’s about 42 lbs now. This food is magic!! I love it! She’s never been “food motivated” and so she’s always been a little reluctant to eat her kibble, but she honestly LIKES this stuff. She’ll do tricks for it like it is a treat. More importantly, her poop is GREAT on this kibble. Finally, it’s easy to pick up! This food is a godsend.

We’ve previously tried Innova EVO, California Natural Lamb and Rice Puppy and Adult, and Canidae All Life Stages. Innova EVO gave her the runs, but she was a new puppy. (The pet food store said EVO was rich enough for puppies. My vet disagreed.) California Natural seemed better, but her poop was always so soft that it was messy to pick up, and she never really liked it. She liked the taste of Canidae better – so much so that she would pick it out when I mixed it with the Lamb and Rice. However, her poop didn’t really improve until we shifted to Orijen.

Magic. This stuff is magic, I say. Besides being the magic food for my dog, it’s also made in Canada with almost all Canadian ingredients. From what I’ve read, they get rice from California and Lamb from New Zealand, but otherwise — everything comes from farms in and around Alberta. No food recalls on this brand!

One word of advice: like with all good dog foods, it’s best to keep the bag tightly closed. It goes stale.

Review by Vladimir Antonyuk for Orijen Adult Formula Dry Dog Food
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The initial food of the cost maybe seem steep, but the ingridients are superior in quality, I like the fact that its made by a small company and I hope they wont be involved in any recalls. The food is very rich, so you’re feeding less then cheap grocery brands full of fillers, meat feeds muscle not corn, my dog has several allergies and for a long time I couldnt settle on a food that didnt upset his stomach or gave him gives, bad breath, etc. He gobbles this up every evening and thinks its a treat.

Well worth the money spent.

Review by HTBK for Orijen Adult Formula Dry Dog Food
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Pet food has an immense range of quality that you can very roughly categorize into three levels. (1) super cheap food that’s basically feeding your dog garbage (1-2 stars); (2) food that’s a good compromise on price and quality, containing some ingredients that aren’t ideal but overall a healthy product (3-4 stars); and (3) “price is no object” foods that make no compromises (5-6 stars). Orijen doesn’t just fall into category 3, it’s the best of it. It’s expensive, but you will not find a better dog food anywhere. Period.

Orijen is a Canada-based company that raises its own chickens, employs its own fisherman to catch fish and deliver them fresh, uses whole eggs instead of dried egg products, and loads its products with the highest quality ingredients you’ll ever find in dog food. It’s good for your dog’s muscles, heart, coat, skin, and is the most biologically appropriate dry dog food there is. Instead of grains for the carb content that it needs to form the kibble, Orijen uses highly digestible fruits and vegetables with nutritious antioxidants and vitamins.

Check out the first 6 ingredients in this product: Fresh deboned chicken, chicken meal, turkey meal, russet potato, fresh deboned pacific salmon (a natural source of DHA and EPA), herring meal. Meat, meat, meat, good carbs, meat, meat.

Compare that to the first 6 ingredients in Hill’s Science Diet Adult Small Bites Dry Dog Food, which I just selected by picking the first large size that came up in a search for “hill’s science diet dry dog food.” Chicken, ground whole grain corn, ground whole grain sorghum, ground whole grain wheat, chicken by-product meal, soybean meal. Meat, grain, grain, grain, low-quality animal filler like beaks and feet, and more grain. It’s loaded with grains that are cheap and known to be difficult to digest, often the cause of allergic reactions in dogs, and not nutritious.

If you want a good compromise product, go for something like Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul Dry Dog Food for Adult Dog, Chicken Flavor, 35 Pound Bag, a very good food that’s a bit more affordable than Orijen. If you want the best of the best for your fuzzy-faced friend(s), get Orijen.

Final note: this is extremely rich food. Introduce it very slowly, even more slowly than you normally would a new food, and expect some loose stools during the process. We started with 1/6 new food and upped it by 1/6 every week, so we took a month a half to transition completely to Orijen. That helped a lot.