Waitrose Dog Food Review & Ratings

The average score tells you almost nothing about Waitrose, and the spread tells you everything. Its rated foods run from 86 to 86 - a gap of 0 points, from the bottom of our table to the upper end of it, under one supermarket's own label.

That is how own-brand works, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about buying dog food in a supermarket. The logo on the packet is a retailer, not a recipe. A supermarket commissions different foods from different manufacturers at different price points and puts the same badge on all of them, so brand loyalty gets you nothing - the aisle is the brand.

Waitrose Senior Grain Free leads at 86/100, which is a genuinely respectable result and better than plenty of foods that cost considerably more. The weakest, at 86, sits at the other end of the table entirely. Open both product pages and the breakdown shows exactly where each one gained and lost its points.

So the advice is unusually simple. Do not buy Waitrose dog food, buy a specific Waitrose dog food. Check the individual product page below before it goes in the trolley, because in this range the difference between the good decision and the poor one is larger than the difference between most brands.