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I see that someone has copy-pasted the same negative review for multiple Bil-Jac products so I decided to provide a counterpoint. I realize that the overwhelming number of dog food choices requires people to have criteria to quickly separate "good" and "bad" dog foods. Nevertheless, critical thinking is important and I don't think most of the reviews available for Bil-Jac products are particularly well thought-out. Meanwhile, a lot of premium pet food brands (even ones I like) are increasingly using tricky ingredient labeling to hide shortcuts, and this goes largely unnoticed.
I am not affiliated with Bil-Jac or any pet food company and, for years before I began to really look at pet foods critically, would never have used or recommended it. The main issues people have with Bil-Jac are that it contains corn and chicken byproducts. Both of those are common in many low-quality pet foods so this is understandable, but Bil-Jac is not a low quality food.
Byproducts are almost exclusively the domain of low-quality foods, because, generally speaking, they could come from anywhere and contain almost anything. They are used because they are cheap. Bil-Jac's chicken byproducts are specifically identified as organs, which are nutritious and which your dog would almost undoubtedly choose to eat even if you wouldn't.
Corn used as empty filler, or especially corn gluten meal used to inflate a food's protein level, are bad. Whole corn meal used to make kibble stick together -as with rice, oatmeal, potatoes, peas, or any other starch -is not necessarily bad.
Conversely, if you read enough pet food labels you will be surprised at how many premium pet foods use multiple "better" starches in combination so that meat bubbles up the ingredient list. If you see meat followed by "rice, barley, oatmeal," "whole brown rice, rice bran, rice flour," or "peas, pea protein, pea fiber," you should be very skeptical of the amount of meat in the food. This practice is disturbingly widespread. Bil-Jac is one of very few brands that discloses the amount of meat used in most formulas, and it is a lot more than most dog foods.
The reason I tried Bil-Jac to begin with is that the manufacturing process is unique and makes it very easily digestible while still containing a large quantity of meat. The sensitive systems formulas in virtually every premium brand achieve their digestibility at least in part by reducing the amount of meat in the product to make it more bland.
My aim here is not to disparage any particular brand of food but to encourage critical thinking when evaluating pet foods. Guidelines are useful but not universal.
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I bought this thing after a recommendation from a pet store rep. My dog hardly touched the stuff, and then I looked at the ingredients: one of the first things on it was corn-a grain known to cause allergies in dogs. As a matter of fact, corn might be the most allergy-prone food amongst dogs. Not to mention, thanks to our friends at Monsanto, it is almost always Genetically modified (GMO) or a franken-food, unless it's organic. Real "premium" dog foods brag that they've no corn.Right at the top of the list of ingredients is chicken-by-products, another no-no among real "premium" dog foods. This means all the waste that it is usually thrown out from the chicken since it's not real meat. Cheap dog foods put this in their food simply because it's cheap, but it's not real meat. A little further down you will notice BHA, an artificial preservative, which again real "premium" dog foods do not have.
In short, BilJac is a joke. It is basically, insanely overpriced Alpo, with no organic ingredients whatsoever, and uses all the shortcuts, filler, and chemistry that the cheapest dog foods on the market use. Don't be fooled by the old-fashioned appeal of the company's 60 years in business. There is nothing but modern chemistry in the bag, and all the folksy appeal will not make up for cheap, lousy ingredients. Calling this stuff premium dog food would be like calling a Kia a Mercedes. For nearly the same price as this overpriced Alpo, one could buy organic dog food, free of preservatives, corn, and cheap by-products!
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