Food Friday: Ziwi Peak 'Daily Dog' Air-Dried Cuisine

Ziwi Peak's Daily Dog Air-Dried Cuisine provides all the convenience of kibble, but is made almost entirely out of meat. It is highly-palatable and not unlike feeding my dogs jerky, so they think it's amazing. I have yet to encounter anything like this before, it's not freeze-dried, nor is it a dehydrated powder. There is no need to add water, and it does not need to be refrigerated either.

I found this food at a shop in a nearby town. The name was familiar, but I had never actually taken a look at their food. I'm glad I did, because this stuff is amazing! It makes the best training treats ever. The dogs all love it and will eat it in almost any circumstance, it doesn't crumble, smell bad, or make my hands all gross. As far as I'm aware I don't have to treat it like raw meat, either. There aren't any warnings on the website or packaging about handling safety.

The ingredient list is pleasantly short. We have the beef version, which consists of meat with ground bone, organs, green-lipped mussel, and that's pretty much it. There are some vitamins, a little kelp and parsley, but this food is basically meat. That's amazing!

What's not so amazing is the price tag. Naturally, good food isn't cheap. This 2.2 lb bag cost me a little over $30. Measuring the food is a bit interesting, it comes with its own 2oz scoop. The bag and website both have feeding calculators that, of course, tell me to feed my dogs way too much. One scoop of food contains about 279 calories. According to the feeding calculator, Ru should be eating 3/4 of a scoop per day, Briz should be getting 2.5 scoops, and Sisci should be getting a little over 3 scoops. Brisbane and Ru both seem to need around 100-150 calories per day, so they actually only get half a scoop. Sisci seems to need around 400-600 calories, so she would get around 2 scoops.

The 2.2 lb bag contains about 18 scoops, that would be a month worth of food for Brisbane by himself. It's a little over two weeks worth of food for Briz and Ru together, and would only last us six days if I decided to feed this exclusively. For Briz by himself, it wouldn't be terribly cost-prohibitive at less than a dollar a day. At $1.78 per scoop, Sisci would cost me about $3.50 a day to feed though, and closer to $6 a day if I were feeding her what the package recommends.

Fortunately, ZiwiPeak also sells a 5.5 lb bag which should contain approximately 45 scoops of food. Unfortunately, the price per ounce appears to remain the same. It goes down to about $1.60 per scoop, but that's not a dramatic reduction. This is an expensive but very high-quality food. Dog Food Advisor gives in five out of vie stars across the board, with a brief mention of an unpleasant interaction with the company's customer service. While many customers seem to have had wonderful experiences, it's possible that ZiwiPeak doesn't like dealing with difficult questions from the extremely well-informed.