When talking about pet food, it is important to understand the difference between ingredients and nutrients. Ingredients are the raw materials in a diet that are vehicles to deliver nutrients. High-quality ingredients such as poultry, meat, rice, and fish oil are absorbed by your cat or dog. Nutrients are absorbed and used by your body. Essential nutrients such as proteins, carbohydrates, and fatty acids cannot be made by your pet’s body and must be provided by their diet.

The Best Breed story begins in 1994 at Dr. Gary’s clinic in Northwest Ohio. Early in his career, as a Veterinarian in private clinical practice, Dr. Gary began observing pet health conditions that he felt were either nutritionally-induced or could be helped through nutrition. Some of these conditions included digestive complications, mobility challenges and skin issues. He knew that all of us, as pet lovers, could improve our best friend’s health and happiness by simply changing their diet. The founding philosophy behind our formulas is what Dr. Gary calls “Common Sense Nutrition.” Common Sense Nutrition means we disregard the usual marketing and cost control techniques often used by the large conglomerate pet food companies and simply develop the healthiest pet foods possible. Each ingredient in our formulas MUST be of the highest quality and MUST be accretive to the overall value of the diet, meaning no animal by-product meals, cheap fillers, any sort of gluten meal and artificial flavoring or coloring.

To do this, Dr. Gary began recommending changes to his clients’ diets — oftentimes it would be as easy as adding fish oil, glucosamine, fresh meat, eggs or vegetables to their current diets. After several years of observing the benefits of altering his clients’ diets by modifying pet foods that were available at the time, Dr. Gary came to the simple conclusion that surely a natural pet food formula could be developed to holistically address these issues.