Food Friday: Lotus Oven-Baked Dry Dog Food

The Lotus pet food company is unique and wonderful, from the way they manufacture their food, to the custom artwork they commission for their packaging. Their dry dog food is oven-baked rather than extruded like most kibble, making it a bit different in texture. This is a particularly neat company that is very transparent about their sourcing and manufacturing.

Lotus

I've blogged about the Lotus company before. They were started by independent pet store owners who were tired of introducing a new brand of food to the their customers, only to have to pull it from the shelves when the company sold out to a giant faceless corporation. For that reason, I am confident that Lotus will never sell out.

One of the reasons I love Lotus is that the don't seem to mention "GMO" anywhere on their site. Yay for science! My dogs are genetically modified (especially Ru!) so I don't see why their food can't be modified too. GMOs are safe, vaccines work, everything is a chemical.

The Food

As much as I love the company and their canned foods, I have to say I'm not in love with their kibble for my current dogs. The protein content in their dry food ranges from 18-27, that's not very much. fat content ranges from 8-14. That means these are basically plant-based foods with a lot of carbohydrates. The Dog Food Advisor website gives the dry Lotus foods a collective rating of four stars based on their low meat content. The ingredients are great, they're just not in the right proportion.

Bottom Line

My dogs like this food and will eat it happily. However, it would not be a good long-term choice for any if them. Godzilla and Zip are both working dogs that require large amounts of protein and fat. Ru is a tiny dog that needs a nutritionally dense food to maintain his body weight. I might choose Lotus for a dog that needed a low-protein diet.