Baxter's

Baxter's is easiest to read against the two other supermarket house labels that also sell an 18kg budget dry bag: Julius at Aldi and Woofin' Good! at Coles. IGA's Black & Gold, the fourth supermarket house label on our index, is left out of that trio only because its bag is 8kg. Julius works out at $2.50 AUD per kg and scores 48 of 100 overall. Woofin' Good! is $2.72 per kg and scores 50. Baxter's Chicken and Vegetables sits between them on price at $2.61 per kg, about $47 a bag on our editorial estimates, yet lands below both at 46 of 100. Middle of the trio on price, last of the trio on score.

The panel is where the gap opens. The 18kg Chicken and Vegetables bag lists cereals and meat meal ahead of any named meat, with protein at 18 per cent, level with Aldi's Julius and under the 20 per cent in the Coles bag, and fat at 10 per cent. Ingredients and transparency are jointly Baxter's weakest pillars at 42 of 100 each: beyond an Australian made claim, there is little published detail on sourcing, and on our separate retailer card Woolworths' own private-label transparency rates just 51 of 100.

Availability, at 72 of 100, is comfortably its strongest pillar, and it cuts both ways. A bag sits on the shelf in every Woolworths in the country, alongside wet food and treats under the same label, a convenience no specialist retailer can fold into the weekly grocery run. Reach on its own is not the win, though: Black Hawk scores 83 on the same availability pillar across five tracked retailers. And exclusivity means one seller and one shelf price, so there is no second retailer to shop that $47 against, and Woolworths runs no pet-specific autoship, which is why the subscription discounts that trim rivals' per-kg cost never apply here.

The honest case for Baxter's is arithmetic. At roughly $1.20 a day for a 15kg adult dog on our editorial estimates, it is among the cheapest feeds in the whole index, and it arrives with the weekly shop rather than in a courier carton. For a household where the food budget is genuinely fixed, or for a Woolworths shopper who needs a short-term top-up bag between orders of their regular food, that $2.61 per kg figure does exactly the job it claims to.

Skip it if the ingredient side of the ledger matters to you at all. At 46 of 100 overall, Baxter's holds the second-lowest score of the 20 brands in our food index: only Black & Gold, at 44, sits beneath it. The step up is measurable, not vague: Black Hawk's 20kg Adult Chicken and Rice lists chicken first, carries 26 per cent protein and works out near $2.10 a day on the same estimates, about 90 cents a day more. Whether that suits your dog is a conversation for your vet: this is not veterinary advice.