Food Friday: Honest Kitchen Instant Goat's Milk Plus Probiotics

Honest Kitchen's Instant Goat's Milk Plus Probiotics is a great way to get all the microbial goodness of yogurt without refrigeration. This was another fabulous product for Brisbane when he was recovering from surgery and on massive doses of antibiotics. Those wreck havoc on the gut flora, and probiotics are a great way to help get things back to normal. My vet usually recommends yogurt with live cultures for a few weeks after antibiotics, but this was less than convenient when I was taking Briz to work with me and feeding him lunch.

The Company

I'm a big fan of Honest Kitchen, even more since they expanded their product line to include allergy-friendly egg-free poultry-free foods. I'm not crazy about their stance on GMOs though, I'm a big fan of better crop yields through science so I am anti-anti-GMO. Yay genetically modified organisms!

Honest Kitchen is both super honest and super responsible, which is why they had a recall for salmonella in 2013. None of their products tested positive for it, however a batch of their human-grade parsley was recalled by the supplier so they recalled everything it went into out of an abundance of caution. They could have decided their food was ok after testing it, they could have waited to see if any dogs got sick with a link to their food, they could have put their image first, but they didn't.

The company has added some new products recently, including their Propper Toppers for adding a special treat to meals. Unfortunately these are made from either chicken or turkey so Brisbane can't have them and therefore I am too annoyed to buy them for my non-allergic dogs. They also make a dry digestive supplement called Perfect Form that sounds like it works a lot like pumpkin only way more expensive. They also recently added an instant beef bone broth which proves they've been stealing my ideas.

The Food

When I opened my can of Instant Goat's Milk, I was rather surprised to find it contained a plastic bag. A half-full plastic bag. I know these things are sold by weight not volume, but this was seriously like buying one of those big boxes of candy at the movie theater and opening it to find like five Skittles.

I love kids!

This stuff mixes up like any powdered milk, with tons of stirring and some lumps no mattered what you do. The dogs like it ok, and the probiotics worked as well as any probiotics do, which is to say Brisbane's tummy issues showed a regression to the mean (normal poo) that may or may not have happened in the absence of the probiotics. 

The Verdict

This is way more convenient to carry around than yogurt, and great when you only need to add probiotics now and then because it's non-perishable. It's also super expensive, at $20 for a can that's maybe 1/4-1/3 full. The can makes 12 cups, I'm pretty sure I could buy 12 cups of goat's milk for less than that. Or maybe I could just milk some goats.