Food Friday: Dogswell Nutrisca Lamb and Chickpea Recipe Dog Food

Dogswell Nutrisca was the first non-potato, low-glycemic kibble I can remember seeing. When it first hit my local pet stores, they sold promotional 2 lb bags for $3. Brisbane was eating a homemade raw diet at the time, but I used kibble for training treats and this was a great option at the time. I could buy a small bag and not have to worry about it going bad before we used it all. Nutrisca kibble originally came in lamb, chicken, and salmon recipes. The concept of making dog food out of chickpeas seemed so radical a decade ago!

The Company

Dogswell has been around since 2004, their flagship product is their Happy Hips glucosamine-fortified chicken jerky. Obviously they must have branched out into dog food fairly quickly, since I was buying promotional bags of it in 2006. 

Dogswell does use a co packer, Tuffy's Pet Foods actually produces Nutrisca. For this reason, Dogswell is more of a dog food marketing company. Tuffy's is the maker of Pure Vita though, they have some pretty serious manufacturing technology and very few recalls of products from their facilities. It's proably impossible for a little startup like Dogswell to make a state-of-the-art kibble production facility so I'm glad they chose Tuffy's as their co packer.

The Food

I bought this particular bag of Nutrisca Lamb and Chickpea Recipe kibble for Sisci and Ru. Brisbane can't eat it because it contains chicken fat. I used to use the salmon version for training treats for him, until I discovered his issue with eggs. Poor allergy dog.

Nutrisca kibbles are very small, so they should be great for little tiny dogs. Unfortunately, Ru won't eat them. He's a picky beast, and mostly refused to eat this food at all. Sisci loved it, though.

This is a grain-free, potato-free food that I like to recommend for diabetic and overweight dogs, as well as ones with yeast issues. It seems to be a very digestible food too, I've had several clients and work switch to Nutrisca and see improvement in their dog's stomach issues.

The Verdict

This is a very high quality dog food. The Dog Food Advisor site rates all of the Nutrisca foods as five out of five stars. They are suitable for all life stages, and this particular food has a moderate caloric content of 370 calories per cup. I don't think I would choose this as an everyday food for my dogs at this point because Brisbane is allergic and Ru won't eat it, but it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for Sisci.