Let’s try an experiment: take a moment to go find the bag of dog food that you have been feeding your companion and check out how big the recommended serving size is, and how many times it suggests you should feed your dog each day. Then run to the grocery store and look at the serving size and feeding rate of a healthy brand for comparison. Notice anything different?

If you took the time to check out the suggested serving size on the healthier food bags you may have noticed that your bargain brand actually suggests that you feed your pet a lot more food, and maybe even more times each day, too. This is because bargain dog food has fewer nutrients than higher quality brands, which makes it both significantly less digestible and require more food to meet health standards. Most major dog feed brands are actually packed with a variety of extra ingredients to take up space and weight in order to stretch out the core ingredients across more bags, sort of how many fast food companies use corn products in their burgers to stretch out the more expensive meat ingredients. This results in food that has far less nutritional value and leaves much more undigested food in the waste products.

Or, to put that in plain English, your dog has to eat a lot more to be healthy, which results in far more feces to clean up after. You end up paying for more food than they actually need to eat and clean up more poo than you ever wanted to simply because you decided to save a few bucks (on the front end) at the supermarket. Yet if you had invested a little more in the food your dog would eat less, evacuate their bowels less, and be happier and healthier to boot.