Woofin' Good!

Our index holds four supermarket house brands, and Woofin' Good! is the Coles one: a retailer-owned label sold exclusively through Coles. It also tops that group at 50 out of 100, ahead of Aldi's Julius on 48, Woolworths' Baxter's on 46 and IGA's Black & Gold on 44. It is the dearest of the four as well. The 18kg Adult Beef & Vegetables bag estimates at $49.00 AUD, or $2.72 per kg, against $2.61 per kg for Baxter's, $2.50 for Julius and $2.25 for Black & Gold. All prices on this page are editorial estimates in AUD and can move week to week.

The 22 cents per kg over Julius buys a slightly denser panel: 20 per cent protein against 18 per cent in all three rival house bags, fat at 10 per cent, and a bag rating of 56 out of 100 where Julius takes 54 and Baxter's 50. That is the ceiling, though. Coles has moved the range onto named-protein recipes, yet the first ingredient we hold for this bag is still cereals and meat meal, and ingredient quality scores 45 out of 100.

Transparency is Woofin' Good!'s equal-weakest pillar at 45 out of 100, level with ingredients and 25 points below its availability mark of 70. For a label owned outright by a major grocer, that is a lot of unpublished detail: Australian manufacture is the substantive claim, with little behind the meat meal line. Our separate Coles retailer card rates the supermarket's private-label disclosure at 51 out of 100, so this reads as a house-wide habit rather than one bag's oversight.

Exclusivity removes the usual ways to shop a price down. One retailer, one bag, an estimated $49.00: Coles runs no pet-specific autoship in our data, scoring 53 out of 100 for subscription, and no price matching, so there is no second sticker to weigh against the first. Grocery delivery starts near $5.00 and turns free above $100. Black Hawk, by comparison, we price across five retailers.

The case for it is arithmetic and errands. At an estimated $1.20 a day for a roughly 15kg adult dog, the $49.00 bag, on our editorial estimates, covers about 41 days, and it travels home in the trolley rather than a courier carton. Dry food, wet food and treats all sit under the one label. A household on a fixed food budget, or a Coles shopper needing a top-up between orders of something else, gets exactly what the availability score of 70 out of 100 describes.

Skip it if the ingredient column carries any weight for you. Woofin' Good! ranks 17th of the 20 brands we score, and the step up is stocked in the same aisle: Coles lists Black Hawk and Ivory Coat, the only two national brands in our index it carries. The Black Hawk 20kg Adult Chicken & Rice leads with chicken at 26 per cent protein, rates 85 out of 100 and estimates near $2.10 a day, though we hold no Coles shelf price for it. Whether any of this suits your dog is a conversation for your vet: this is not veterinary advice.