Feeding my dog - which dry food?

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I currently feed my 2yr old Bedlington with Tails dry dog food. This is supplemented with portions of wet food in gravy/jelly.

Tails which is a mixed dry kibble type food comes by post on subscription basis. My dog who is not very food driven tbh has been happy on it. BUT it is expensive.

Budgets are tightening and I like to see if I could find a cheaper but good enough dry kibble type to replace it.

Any recommendations?

Mine has the Webbox naturals dry with the naturals wet food sausages in the pastel coloured packets (not to be confused with the awful Chubb roll).

The dry food is available in B&M for £3.50/ 2kg or it's £4 in The Range or Wilkinsons. The sausages are available in most supermarkets and vary in cost per size. She will eat the dry by itself which she has never done with any other dry food I've tried.

Used to have a different GSD with a very delicate tum and it was the vet who told me to move to Chappie dry. It worked really well for her.

This is very helpful. Thank you to everyone who is replying. Definitely going to try something new.

Re the heart concerns. Lots and lots of owners choose grain free food and my understanding (happy to be corrected) is that rates of DCM have not risen in correlation. The studies which showed a link relied on lab dogs being fed grain free diets much higher in legumes than standard gf diets are and reading the small print of the studies showed they were sponsored by Waltham, which owns brands such as Pedigree and Royal Canin. For me, it’s a bit like Nestle paying for studies to show Aptamil is as good as breastmilk. Personally I feed Wolfworthy which is grain free but having compared the ingredients to Royal Canin I’m happy it’s the right choice. It’s only my opinion, and you’re free to ignore, but personally I think the issue is a bit more nuanced than it seems.

I'm by now means an expert, but my view on the grain free thing fwiw...

My dog is allergic to chicken. I found it very difficult to find a kibble that was completely chicken free - even many fish varieties contain chicken fat. Been a while since I did the research but off the top of my head I couldn't find any fully chicken free that were not also grain free.

My reading was that the heart concerns mainly related to larger dogs. As mine is a small breed, the theoretical low risk of that compared to the actual known risk of allergies meant that I don't really have any concerns about grain free for my dog.

We are feeding Gentle - it gets 93% on allaboutdogfood. We bought a 5kg bag for £30, but it's cheaper to buy it in the bigger bag (we wanted to check she would eat it first). You don't need as much because of it because of the ingredient ratio.

It's cold-pressed, high protein. It's a complete food but we mix it with a little chicken / sardines / spoon of Bolognese / etc to make it more interesting.

The best I’ve found by a long way is DR johns titanium. It’s about £25 for a 15kg bag and all of my dogs are gleaming. It also hasn’t flared up my allergic one which cheap feed normally does!

We used to have tails. I have switched to Harrington's. It's a good quality food make in uk with nothing added. Meat is no 1 content I buy it in Morrison's they often have a deal on. The last 5kg bag I got was 8 pound.

@GiantCheeseMonster the original concerns were raised by the FDA in the US. Thiss* article in AAHA journal gives a good summary of what is known current. The research was carried out at Tufts University the lead author has received funding for other projects from a wide variety of pet food companies, but the DCM study was not funded by a pet food company. The AAHA article provides a link to the published study in the AVMA journal. Both the AVMA and AAHA journal are peer reviewed.

That suggests a possible link with peas, though, rather than gf diets per se? So a diet which substitutes peas for grain might be problematic, but a quality gf diet isn’t necessarily. I have read that it might be low taurine which is the issue, and that isn’t a problem with good quality gf food which has lots of organ meat.

Pooch and Mutt for us, sweet potato based grain free so good news.

With a subscription and discount code it's well under £20 a month for us.

He gets wet on evening but not every day. Sometimes it's tinned sardines, or a scrambled egg etc