Scratch

Scratch is the property of the two people who started it, Australian co-founders Mike Halligan and Doug Spiegelhauer, and its head office sits in Collingwood, Victoria. There is no corporate parent above it, which matters because the owners answer for the recipes directly. Manufacturing stays onshore too: the kibble comes out of New South Wales and the frozen raw food is likewise made in Australia. The company also carries B-Corp certification, one of the few structural claims a buyer can verify independently of the brand's own marketing.

What independence buys the shopper shows up in the transparency pillar, where Scratch scores 95 out of 100, its strongest result across the six measures. The label carries a precise figure beside every ingredient, a practice unique among major Australian brands in our data, so anyone weighing the turkey recipe knows the lead ingredient is turkey meal at 27 per cent before a bag is opened. The large majority of ingredients are drawn from local Australian farms, and the company keeps a vet in-house. Disclosure at that depth lets you audit what you are feeding; whether you like the answer is a separate decision.

Scratch runs two formats, dry kibble and frozen raw, but the four products in our index are all kibble and all come in a single 8kg bag. The pricing ladder starts with Grain-Free Turkey & Beef at $84.95, steps through Pasture-Raised Lamb with Ancient Grains at $98.95 and Grain-Free Mackerel & Salmon at $101.95, and finishes at Sensitive Kangaroo at $116.95. Per kilogram that is a run from $10.62 to $14.62, a spread of exactly four dollars, and every figure is an editorial estimate in Australian dollars rather than a live quote from the brand's own site.

Turkey & Beef anchors the range in every sense: it is the cheapest bag, the highest rated at 87 out of 100, and it is formulated for all life stages including large-breed puppies, at 29 per cent protein. Around it sit three specialist plays. Mackerel & Salmon uses fish as the only animal protein and tops the range at 30 per cent protein. Sensitive Kangaroo pairs a novel protein with added joint compounds, glucosamine, chondroitin and hydrolysed collagen. Lamb with Ancient Grains is the lone grain-inclusive recipe, at 23 per cent protein and unsuited to large-breed puppies expected to pass 32kg. None of this is veterinary advice.

Check any of the ten retailers in our stockist index, from the pet chains Petbarn, Petstock and Pet Circle through to the supermarket aisles at Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and IGA, and you will not find a Scratch bag. The brand's stockist list in our data is empty, and each of its four indexed products carries no retailer pricing at all. That is deliberate rather than a distribution failure: Scratch sells from its own website on a flexible subscription, and its availability score of 62 out of 100, the lowest of its six pillars, is simply the honest cost of that choice.

Practically, buying Scratch means committing to deliveries rather than errands. You choose a delivery interval and flex it as your dog's appetite shifts, and the food arrives at the door; the trade is that an empty bag on a Sunday night cannot be fixed at a shop, so the interval needs a few days of buffer built in. The subscription also comes with the brand's in-house vet support, which partly offsets the absence of in-store staff. Households that prefer picking food off a shelf, or comparing bags side by side in an aisle, are the wrong audience for this model.