Customer Reviews

Orijen Grain-Free Adult Dry Dog Food, 15.4lb

5 star:		(56)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

After many fits and starts, I 've totally switched my two Flat coated Retrievers to Orijen. Fantastic quality food and although price per pound is higher in reality w/o the cereal and other fillers of so many other dog foods, its actually only nominally more expensive. I weaned my K-9s (ages 2 and 6) off other commercial foods and have found their stools now on 100% Orijen are normal, not odorous (during the transition there is some how do we say "stink" as this food contains beneficial probiotics that initially are dealing with the grain based old foods in the K-9s digestive tract). Also my k-9s sleep inside at night and travel quite bit with me to training and searches - nothing worse than a dog flatulance and there is none and I mean none of that with this food Yeah! My K-9s are my Search and Rescue partners and this has given them excellent stamina, better coats and they both relish it. I'm using New Zealand dried lamb bits for training and reward treats but occasionnally use just a few Orijen kibbles instead and you would think I was serving them prime rib. Wish I could find a local vendor in RI - shipping is a little steep but many of the vendors will offer you a significant discount on the second order so I order two bags at a time and change-up the flavors from time to time so the K-9s don't get jaded. Can't say enough how pleased I am with food.

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.

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.

As for the quality of this food if you're unfamiliar with holistic foods, this stuff is top quality. It has many forms of meat, no grains whatsoever, and no controversial ingredients, etc... You know the drill, a top quality food that is unavailable in grocery stores. Actually one of the best on the market amongst hundreds of different kinds.

This stuff is pricey but your dog will eat less so it sort of offsets the price a bit. With regular food your dog is eating corn, potato peelings, rotten rice, and animal guts and blood swept off the floor of the slaughter house. That food is so low in nutrients your dog must eat tons of it and poop out all the poison that shouldn't be in the food. With a great food like Orijen your dog will eat less, absorb most of it, and have fewer and more solid stools.

There are a few people who are a little weary of Canidae. Canidae now makes a grain free formula which is excellent. It's almost as good as Orijen and cheaper as well. If you want one of the better foods on the market and a good price, Canidae grain free is your ticket. But if you absolutely want the Lamborghini of dog foods then Orijen is your buy, although Canidae is a Porsche and still pretty darn good.

Pet food has an immense range of quality that we like to roughly categorize into three levels. (1) super cheap food that's basically feeding your dog garbage; (2) food that's a good compromise on price and quality, containing some ingredients that aren't ideal but overall a healthy product; and (3) "price is no object" foods that make no compromises. 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 or cat food anywhere.

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 nothing but the highest quality ingredients. It's good for your dog's muscles, heart, coat, skin, and is the most biologically appropriate dry dog food out there. 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 (the whole list is good, but I have to stop somewhere so this review doesn't get too long): 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.

My pup (3 year old maltese) has a serious allergy to grain and a generally screwed up digestive system. The first year of his life was sort of trial and error when it comes to the right kind of dog food for him and a lot of long nights with upset stomachs. Eukanuba (which can barely be called dog 'food') nearly killed him and he ended up having to get fluids injected because of how dehydrated he got on it. Hundreds of dollars to the vet later, we did research on dog food and the common grain allergy. We have tried all of the good grain-free brands, like Evo, Wellness, Merrick, etc. Orijen has been the best of the bunch.

If you are worried about your dog having too much protein, I haven't really had a problem at all despite my little dog. He has been on Orijen for over two years and he is pretty much all lean muscle (all 13lbs of him!), despite being mostly sedentary outside of daily walks. He has clear, tear-stain free eyes, a shiny coat, and has never been sick since starting on this food. I can't help but think his excellent quality food has been keeping him healthy!

Orijen is expensive, but worth it!

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.

Our dog was having trouble with grocery store purchased dog food. She would eat it and a half hour to four hours later she would throw it up. This cycle went on for months. We took her to the vet and they ran all sorts of tests and everything came back negative. So the vet's solution was to put her on a stomach medicine...for the rest of her life!

Not wanting to put her on drugs for the rest of her life (she's only 2 yrs old) I started doing some research and discovered that many dogs have a food allergy to grains, especially corn and corn by-products which are in just about every commercial dog food.

Then I stumbled onto grain-free dog foods and this led me to Orijen. All I can say is "Wow!"
I tried a small sample bag first (purchased at a store an hour away) and she loved it. Best of all, it stayed down.
Then I bought a larger bag. Yes, it's more expensive but she eats a smaller quantity so overall each month I'm not spending any more money on dog food.

In the 6 months we have had her on Orijen Adult Formula, she has not thrown up her food at all. Not once! (She also likes the Orijen fish formula too) I find that simply amazing. Her coat is shiny and glossy now and she clearly feels good!

The only negative for us is that it is not available locally and I have to drive an hour to a larger city to buy it. Occasionally I have ordered it online. But we have a new pet store opening up here soon that will be carrying it so that will resolve our "where to buy it" issue.

I strongly recommend that VETS also suggest a grain-free diet for dogs having stomach/digestive issues instead of just automatically reaching for the Rx pad. My two cents.

I have a 6 year-old black lab mix and a 2 year-old lhasa-poo that were both having major allergy issues...they would puke every day on Iams, Eukanuba and even the low-res stuff the vet gave me. I tried a pre-packaged raw diet, but it was a bit pricey for 3 dogs. I found this one and I'll never go back to another. I haven't had any issues with this one in the year they've been on it...my dogs love it and my third black lab has the most BEAUTIFUL coat! I'm extremely happy with the results of this food!

Our five year old Thai Ridgeback was getting a little chunky after a particularly snowy winter. The owner of our dog walking service mentioned Orijen food as a way to slim her down. We had been feeding her Science Diet, 1/2 sensitive skin, 1/2 light food. We always considered her to be reasonably healthy and active. Twice before I had attempted to switch her to "fancier" holistic foods and both times she began losing hair. I suspected lamb as the culprit but it could have been some other ingredient. I have never reviewed anything before or felt passionate enough about a product to sing it's praises until now.

The minute you open the bag you notice the food smells wonderful. It looks high quality. The dog LOVES it. It's is excruciating to wait for that first bag that is mixed 50/50 to be finished so you can completely transition. We knew right away that this was a good choice, but as time went on I was stunned at all the aspects of her health that improved. 1) Ashy-ness that she had developed on her elbows went completely away. 2) Her coat grew noticeably thicker and shinier over several months. 3) <Gross-out Alert> Her stool is firm and smaller; she stopped farting, and no longer experiences anal sack leakage. 4) After a year of feeding her this food she is now visibly leaner and looks awesome for 6 years old. This is the best thing we could have done.

Now the economy of it. Science Diet is $45 bucks for 30lbs. This stuff is $65. BUT, since she digests more of the product we literally feed her 2/3's the amount we used to, and she seems more satisfied, doesn't stand by her bowl and beg for more. It's basically a wash on price!

In response to the reviews that claim this food is dangerous, I have a hard time believing those aren't planted by a rival company. She just got a full check up and three year rabies shot at our vet. There isn't anything wrong with her liver. The vet said they were not familiar with Orijen yet, but they agree that she is noticeably healthier and the higher protein content is perfectly safe. It's about what is not in this food that makes the difference for me. No pesticides, no cheap stabilizers, no filler grains, no ground up bones and connective tissues. I'm not a vet or nutritionist but I am a first-hand witness to the positive effects of this wonderful food. Thank you Orijen!!!