Tasty Tuesday: PEAK Wrap Up

Over the course of a month, my dogs tried out Rachel Ray's PEAK dog food. Between my two dogs, I have a medium size (Koira, at 40 lbs) and a small (Ptera, at 10 lbs). I've already done a couple of posts about PEAK when we first got it and part way through our month of testing it out, so this is mostly meant for our final thoughts about the food.

PEAK has some really decent ingredients in it. If I am nit picky about it, I would say that both recipes have chicken, so it isn't an allergen friendly line of food currently, though it is grain free, which is what Koira requires in a food. In the Open Range flavor that we tried, beef and chicken meal are the first two ingredients, which is great. Lamb meal is listed as the 8th ingredient, venison as the tenth, and lamb as the 11th. So while those proteins are in the food, they don't appear to make up a major part of it. That said, I don't really have a problem with it, other than that having venison and lamb listed on the front of the bag seems to be over stating its presence in the food.



The kibble size and shape worked well for both of my dogs. Ptera had to chew the kibbles a bit, but had no issues. Little dogs who are picky about too big of kibble size may not like the food because of it, but robust small dogs shouldn't have a problem.



When I make frozen kongs (which is an on again, off again kind of thing depending on my motivation levels) I use kibble and pumpkin, which you see in the pictures. Ptera can't seem to effectively clean out the very back of a kong, regardless of how small the kong is. I put kibble in before any other ingredient so that the kibble loosely takes up the space at the back, making it so I don't have to clean out leftovers licked into the back part of the kong after she eats. Then I layer pumpkin and kibble through the rest of the kong. Sometimes I will add peanut butter, yogurt, or something else, but most of the time, I keep it simple. The leftover pumpkin gets frozen in an ice cube tray for when it is needed for digestive support.

Anyway, my point here was mostly that this kibble works well for this purpose. The round shape works better than a flat kibble in filling up the empty space. And, neither of my dogs ever lost any enthusiasm for eating PEAK, so it works well to help break up the texture of the pumpkin and give them something extra tasty to work towards in their kongs.



Another way I feed PEAK (as well as in the kongs mentioned above, and the Kong wobbler mentioned in a previous post) is in a slow feed/puzzle bowl. When I have pumpkin already out, I will smear it around on the crevices of the bowl as well as on the kibble to make the meal take longer. Ptera approves of this idea, and she is more than willing to work for kibbles.

Concentrating hard on getting out every last bit

Finally, a bonus that this food has over most grain free foods is that it is available on grocery store shelves. I personally prefer to have my food delivered to me, because I don't have to haul a big bag of food into a cart, into my car, and into the house, just from the doorstep to the food bin. But if you are not good at planning (and for some reason don't use autoship on Chewy.com for your food), travel and forget to bring food, run out too early, or whatever other reason, PEAK is available on grocery store shelves (though it does cost a few more dollars in store).

My local Safeway store

At the end of the month, I have to say, my dogs liked this food. I was happy with the ingredients. Having it available at grocery stores in case of emergency is a pretty neat option as well.