Bella + Duke Dog Food Review & Ratings

Bella & Duke sells raw food on subscription, portioned and delivered frozen, and on the measure this site cares about it does very well indeed. The 10 foods we have rated average 88/100 - Very good - which puts it 29 of 290 ranked brands.

The reason is not marketing, it is the label. The recipes are short, the meat is named and quantified, and there is very little on the ingredient list you could not picture. That is the whole basis of our score, and raw food built this way tends to earn it: there is simply less room to hide a vague category in a recipe with six things in it.

Two honest caveats, neither of them nutritional.

The first is cost. Raw subscription food is several times the daily price of a good dry food, and it scales with the size of your dog - a big dog on raw is a serious monthly commitment. The cost per day on each food below is the number to compare, not the weekly subscription price, which is designed to be compared with nothing.

The second is practicality. Raw needs freezer space you may not have, and it needs sensible handling - separate utensils, proper defrosting, and the hand-washing you would not think twice about with raw chicken for yourself. Plenty of households find that fine. Some find it is one thing too many, and there is no shame in that.

One thing we will not do is tell you raw is better than cooked. The evidence does not support a blanket claim either way, and anyone who tells you otherwise with total confidence is selling something. What we can say is narrower and more useful: as a label, this is among the best-scoring things on the site, and if raw suits your household it is a serious option.

If it does not suit your budget or your freezer, a high-scoring cold-pressed or dry food will feed your dog well - and our directory ranks those exactly the same way, by what is on the label.