To give our readers transparency into our dog food ratings we have outlined how we come up with the ratings themselves.
We rate dog food out of five stars and the highest rating that a dog food can get is 5/5.
To get to the star rating, we take 3 factors into account:
- Ingredient Quality
- Customer Reviews
- Price
Once we have the individual ratings of each category, then we average the 3 metrics to come up with the final rating.
Let’s take a deeper look into what and how we evaluate in each category.
How We Evaluate Dog Food
1. Ingredient Quality
Ingredient quality is a complex topic because each dog food has many ingredients to investigate and assigning a score is challenging. We use the method developed by Sarah Irick to grade the ingredients in dog foods and assign a score. Learn more about the process here.
2. Customer Reviews
Taking customer reviews into account allows us to get a better idea of the customer satisfaction sentiment of a particular dog food. We take average of customer reviews from Amazon.com, Chewy.com, and Petco.com to calculate the overall customer review rating.
3. Price
Price is an important aspect of any purchase and therefore we include price in our rating calculation. Price, low or high, does not tell us if the dog food itself is good or provides value. However, taking price into account with the other two metrics gives us a good idea of the value you are getting at a particular price point.
Our price assessments are based off the price of a 30lb bag or similar weight (some are 28lbs or 31lbs).
- $15 – $30 = 5.0 Stars
- $31 – $40 = 4.7 Stars
- $41 – $50 = 4.4 Stars
- $51 – $60 = 4.2 Stars
- $60+ = 4.0 Stars