Any dog owners here?
I just adopted a dog last summer, and I’ve done a lot of research to see which brand of food is the best for my precious one. After reading many articles on what ingredients the best dog food should contain and checking many dog food review websites, I decided to feed my dog Orijen dry dog food. It has constantly received high ratings and is always in the “best dog food” lists. I’ve gotten quite a few recommendations and compliments on this brand, so I settled on Orijen. Not once did the sustainability of the company cross my mind.
Last class, we compared different tools to evaluate how well companies are doing in term of sustainability. I was on the Good Guide website and I checked out what rating Orijen dog food had. Surprisingly, it was only rated overall at 4.8/10. What?! Digging deeper, I found that the overall rating was an average of 3 sub-ratings:
- Health (7.5/10)
- Environment (3.4/10)
- Society (3.6/10)
Again, I thought that even though maybe the company isn’t transparent about their environmental practices, the brand would receive a 10/10 for Health, but that was not the case.
After comparing several dog food brands on Good Guide and a trusted dog food review website, I have discovered that there is inconsistency between the health ratings of the dog brands. I would expect that the Health rating of dog food would be similar for both websites, but it was actually drastically different for some brands. Take these two brands of dry dog food for example:
- Orijen Regional Red
Good Guide overall rating: 4.8/10 (one of the lowest rated in Good Guide)
Good Guide Health rating: 7.5/10
Dog Food Advisor Health rating: 5/5, or 10/10 - Beneful Incredibites
Good Guide overall rating: 7.3/10 (one of the highest rated in Good Guide)
Good Guide Health rating: 9.2/10
Dog Food Advisor Health rating: 1/5, or 2/10 - Taste of the Wild
Good Guide overall rating: 4.6/10
Good Guide Health rating: 7.6/10
Dog Food Advisor Health rating: 4.5/5, or 9/10
As you can see, there is some discrepancy in the health ratings. Although Beneful is rated extremely low on a Dog Food Advisor, it is rated extremely high at 9.2 on Good Guide – in fact it is even higher than Orijen, which is rated 10/10 on Dog Food Advisor but only 7.5 on Good Guide. Similarly, even when Taste of the Wild is rated 9/10 on Dog Food Advisor, it is only at 4.6 overall rating on Good Guide.
My conclusion is that on Good Guide, the weight of environmental and social impact ratings of companies is almost more than the actual product quality. This worries me because if consumers are relying solely on Good Guide to decide which product to purchase, the overall rating (which is the most used) may not accurately portray the product quality. If we look at the Orijen rating screenshot from above, there are actually 11 people who recommend the product, and 2 who would avoid the product – which means this product is actually recommended. This is contradictory to Good Guide’s website rating of the product, which is rated poorly.
I think that if consumers are looking for online reviews make a purchase decision, several different sources should be used and avoid jumping to conclusions just by looking at overall ratings, which may be an average of several different indicators. I would probably still use Good Guide, but maybe only to some extent and I will probably look for other sources for reviews. Anyway, I am curious about your thoughts!
Here’s my dog by the way!
