This past winter some extreme weather events have caused havoc with courier deliveries and so a question we were frequently asked by our customers has been - what should I feed my dog if I run out of Genius Pet Food before my courier can deliver?
The answer to this really depends on the specific reason that you are feeding Genius. We have many customers who are just looking for a premium quality, well formulated, New Zealand made dog food that is high in real meat protein but their dog does not have any specific health issues. For these customers their dog will be fine eating any food for a few days.
However many of our customers have their dog on our food due to food allergies or intolerances that manifest as skin disease or bowel issues. For these dogs a change in the components of the diet, even for a few days, can be a problem.
In this situation you have three options:
1. Check if you have a local Genius stockist
We are slowly building up a network of stockists throughout the country and so check on our stockists page on our website to see if there is a local stockist. We can always recall you order back to our depot in Tauranga so you don't end up with too much food!
2. Find a commercial diet that has a similar novel protein and novel carbohydrate ingredient profile as Genius Ocean Fish
What you are looking for is a diet with only fish as it's protein source and a novel carbohydrate such as rice or potato. The diet with the most similar ingredient profile to ours that we would recommend in this situation is Blackhawk fish and potato. This is widely stocked in vet clinics and pet stores throughout the country.
Most of the other similar diets are unfortunately grain free diets containing high levels of legumes, as such we wouldn't recommend long term feeding of these diets. Short term feeding of several weeks should not be a problem however. Our food is made in the same factory as the Addiction range and so for a short term measure we would recommend Addiction Salmon.
3. Make your own homemade diet to tide you over for a few days
Often this is the easiest stop-gap measure. All you have to do is grab some fish, rice, veges and fruit from the supermarket and mix them all together. You can feed this mixture either cooked or raw.
The main ingredients in our diet are NZ King Salmon, white fish, rice, peas, potatoes, tapioca, carrots, blueberries, kiwifruit and apples. So you can try to make a mix of these or you can keep it simple and just use a fish, rice, peas and potato mix.
Obviously long term feeding of a homemade diet that is not complete and balanced can be a problem, but so long as you are only feeding your homemade mix for a week or so there should not be any issues.
If you are aware your delivery is likely to be late, but you still have a small amount of Genius Ocean Fish left, then you can also use a homemade mix added to what you have left to stretch it out and make it last a bit longer.
How much pet food should you keep on hand?
What we've learnt through the Nelson floods is that if roads are knocked out then courier deliveries can easily take 4-5 days longer than you would usually expect. Add in a normal delivery time frame and realistically you would want to have up to 2 weeks worth of food on hand at all times if you can, especially if you are on rural delivery.
Where is your pet food sent from?
Currently all our food is stored with our distributor in Tauranga. We are looking to add some additional South Island distribution early next year when we expand our range of bag sizes. This will speed up deliveries to our South Island customers.
