Forgive the internal quote responses on the first part,
bold/italic/blue are mine...
Here are some factors that I'd consider, if you're interesting in buying a food that's not on that list.
- Figure out where you want to buy your food and what you're willing to pay.
Absolutely agreed.
- Look for a food that contains a statement on the label that it has been through an AAFCO feeding trial.
Absolutely agreed, this should be a minimum, but it should also be pointed out that AAFCO is a minimum standard for pet survival and is woefully behind when it comes to subjects like probiotics. Carnivores will eat entrails for gut flora, and there's a direct link between maintaining healthy gut flora colonies and proper digestion in all critters leading to greater health (and it's gotta be populated from somewhere), yet AAFCO doesn't recommend or require probiotics in dog and cat food.
- Look for a reputable company. A lot of people think boutique companies are better, but very few of them employed trained veterinary nutritionists, do their own R&D, or even have their own dedicated manufacturing plants.
Agree in principle, but it should go far deeper than this. It should be about stewardship and respect for life in general (from the life put into the food to the life the food sustains) before shareholder profits.
- Don't pay extra for grain-free. It's just a marketing ploy.
Agree in principle, but there are some carb sources that are more prone and frequent to rapid mold growth than others. However, if you only embrace manufacturers that have ethical stewardship toward life and ingredient quality, that becomes a far lesser issue and point of concern.
- Don't pay any attention to the Dog Food Adviser or most of the other online sites. Lots of pseudoscience and 'woo' there.
Don't disagree on a lot of the woo and pseudoscience out there. However, hard-line science can be taken to an equal extreme that can also betray the fundamentals of ethical stewardship. Just because you can manufacture a vegetarian dog or cat food that technically ticks off all the known hard data points on needed nutrition for the species and keeps the animal alive, doesn't make it any more appropriate to feed an obligate or facultative carnivore than overly diseased and rotten food compensated with the same nutritional supplements to make it equally "acceptable" to feed after killing off the pathogens through extreme heat treatment. The problem in both cases is that you're using extreme nutritional science to make palatable and acceptable from a purely laboratory standpoint "food" that should never be fed to the animal in the first place.
Survival is not the same standard as healthy, though there's a lot more money to be extracted from sickly life, but that's the vertical integration business model for you...
Here are some good resources if you're interested in learning more:
http://www.wsava.org/sites/default/files/Nutrition%20on%20the%20Internet%20dogs.pdf
http://www.wsava.org/sites/default/files/Recommendations%20on%20Selecting%20Pet%20Foods.pdf
There's some good information there, but there's also a little poorly informed information designed to undermine what may otherwise be perfectly good info. My biggest objection is from the first link, "The Savvy Dog Owner's Guide: Nutrition on the Internet":
Read the website address. Sites with an address ending in .com are commercial. Those ending in .edu are educational and those ending in .org are nonprofit organizations. Large pet food companies often have high-wuality websites with good general nutrition information that is separate from their product information.
ICANN does not restrict which people and legal entities can and cannot register in the .COM or .ORG namespaces. Though they are correct that .COM was intended for commercial organizations and .ORG for nonprofits, .COM and .ORG TLDs (top level domains) should never be used as grounds to determine information quality and source because of registration audience guidelines. I've seen NGOs register .COM domains, and I've seen for-profit companies register .ORG domains, and there's nothing legally stopping them from doing so. I've also seen quality information from .COM TLDs, and I've seen garbage information from .ORG TLDs just as much as I've seen the inverse be true.
As for absolutely trusting anything published on the .EDU namespace, remember two things: 1) Many colleges and universities still allow webspace for students to publish anything they want under an .EDU domain without peer review; 2) Look up the domain of The University of Phoenix. 'Nuff said.
My go-to brands, based on the research and quality control that go into their foods, are Purina ProPlan (what my dog & cats eat), Royal Canin, and Science Diet.
I do want to respect you and other vets here, Startingsmall, I do... but this statement bothers me. Nestle Purina has a long established history of putting profits over life in all their market segments, and no matter how "complete" the basic nutrition is with Purina Pro Plan, given the quality of meat and vegetation they have been known to put into their food for years? It's clear they do not respect life. Diseased and gangrenous rotting chickens and healthy chickens legally on ingredient lists due to the blind eye the FDA turns towards pet food are both listed as chicken, just as an example. Using these sorts of ingredients for "food" for an animal demonstrates a failure to respect the life that went into the food and the life that food is meant to sustain. Just because the diseased animals and plant life have been cooked to the point of killing off the pathogens to make it "safe", doesn't magically make it healthy or appropriate to feed.
It's not that Nestle Purina is intrinsically evil, it's that they're indifferent so long as they turn a profit, and will do whatever it takes to keep that profit as high as possible with little ethical framework but money itself to guide decisions.
When a vet, a profession with an oath designed to respect and nurture life, recommends a pet food manufacturer that abuses and exploits life for profit... it leaves me to pause and ask if that is a vet I would trust my own pets' lives to, because your recommendation is not practicing the values your degree professes.