Product: Sojos Complete Dog Food Mix
Quantity: 2 lbs/907 grams (package says it makes 10 pounds of food)
Price paid: $15.99
Ingredients: sweet potatoes, turkey, whole egg, broccoli, celery, apples, flax meal, pecans, tricalcium phosphate, pumpkin, cranberries, basil, dried alfalfa, ginger root, dried kelp, zinc sulfate, vitamin E acetate, vitamin D3
Guaranteed analysis:
Crude protein: not less than 22.0%
Crude fat: not less than 8.0%
Crude fiber: not more than 5.1%
Moisture: not more than 12.3%
Calories per cup = 480.8 Kcals
Country of manufacture: USA
Company information: Sojourner Farms; 1723 Adams Street NE; Minneapolis, MN 55413; tel: 1.888.867.6567
Website: Sojos.com, also on Facebook
Based on our success with our first attempt at dehydrated dog food, I decided I would grab a full box when I next went to Pet Store A. Unfortunately, they don’t stock the brand I was looking for, so I purchased what I thought was an equivalent product, a 2 pound bag of Sojos turkey recipe.
Thus I learned that not all dehydrated foods are created the same.
While the other brand was a great success, even with a fairly quick transition, this one failed. Frankly, this is probably the biggest gastrointestinal failure we’ve experienced this past year, and that’s saying a lot for The House of Two Dog Foodies who are actually fairly happy to try new things.
To prepare the food, Sojos instructions say to soak the mixture in an appropriate amount of filtered water and allow it to reconstitute for an hour at minimum, overnight in the refrigerator for optimum results.
So here it is after about an hour. Note that the ingredients are still pretty chunky, which gives the impression of heartiness (as opposed to the powder-turned-paste of the previous brand that we tried). However, as I found out, the chunkies are not to be desired.
For the first few dinners, I served it up similarly to how I prepared the other brand. I mixed the reconstituted Sojos with a home prepared blend of raw turkey and supplements, with Sojos making up about 1/4 of the meal. Both Bows were quite enthusiastic about their New! Food! as they usually are.
Then I bumped the ratio up to 1/2 Sojos, and that’s when trouble became evident. Perhaps I transitioned them too quickly. Sojos FAQs recommend a transition time of 2-3 weeks, but so do most foods that I switch over a shortened period. I gave this some thought and based on my inspections and observations, I’m not sure a longer transition would have made that much difference.
Both of their poops were pretty densely populated by orange and yellow chunks in the days following the introduction of this food. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I gave them a break one day for a full raw meal. Then the following morning, Bowpi threw up. All that was in her vomit was bile and undigested chunks of Sojos potatoes. The stuff had been sitting in her stomach for over a day before her body finally surrendered it.
Before you add water…
Sweet potatoes in and of themselves are not typically a problem. Both Bows have had potatoes in various dog treats without any digestive upsets, and I frequently bake sweet potatoes to add to their meals. However, I usually mash it up a little, and I never include the skins, whereas Sojos does.
This is also problematic because the ingredient seems to take a long time to fully reconstitute. Even after soaking for the recommended amount of time, many of the potato pieces feel quite hard. I know this because I started picking them out, piece by piece.
This human loves potatoes with skins. The Bows? Not so much.
Picking out the potato chunks after rehydration seemed to create a lot of waste, so I started picking out as much as I could while it was still dry.
This led me to observe that there are a LOT of potatoes in this mix. It is, after all, the very first listed ingredient. I assumed that even though turkey is listed second, this was due to the fact that it had lost some weight in the dehydration process. However, as Mike Sagman at the Dog Food Advisor points out, the published ingredients do not specify dehydrated turkey, but “USDA turkey” (which is also slightly different from just “turkey” on the packaging). Even if reconstitution increases the relative weight of turkey, all the ingredients would be rehydrated as well, and this would not change the fact that the ingredients are, by law, listed in order of weight before cooking.
I’m not sure how that shakes out if the ingredients are supposed to be raw, as the front of the bag claims the complete mix is made with “FREEZE-DRIED RAW turkey”. For those that are curious, there’s also some discussion of the relative nutritional value of freeze-drying raw versus air-dehydrating cooked meats in the comments section of the Dog Food Advisor link above, including a very recent comment from the company owner. It doesn’t definitively answer the question of proportions, but it does show that the company holds itself responsible for what people want to know about their food.
However it’s calculated, there’s still a buttload of sweet potato in this mix, probably more than I really have the time to pick through. But I am picking through it because I’m a cheap-ass, and I can’t stand the thought of throwing out something that I’ve paid good money for, dammit. I’m not exactly proud of how much energy I’ve spent de-tubering each pile of Sojos, but the process does seem to make the ingredients less, um, discernible on the way out.
With the formula thus compromised, I ended up using dollops of Sojos only to supplement up to 50% of their meals. Their poops were no longer nearly as colorful, and Bowpi didn’t throw up potato chunks anymore.
However, something else started to happen to Bowpi. She started to nibble and lick at her forearms, as well as the tops of her toes.
28 June 2011
This could be entirely coincidental, or even a result of environmental allergies and not food-related. There’s a section of text on the bag that addresses my concern:
Q: What if my dog has allergies?Because Sojos isn’t processed into a pellet or sprayed with synthetic additives (which can burden the body with toxicity), your pet shouldn’t experience allergic reactions like they might with traditional pet foods. (Sojo’s bag)
Okay, but I’m not entirely convinced yet. Considering that Bowpi had such problem-free skin and fur last year, and because the location of her itchy spots is so oddly dispersed (despite appearances, she’s actually NOT licking her belly any more than usual)… well, I’m leaning towards this being a reaction to some ingredient in the food. Maybe pecans, a protein that she hasn’t previously been exposed to? At any rate, no more Sojos for Bowpi, and I’m monitoring her skin in the meantime. I’ll return to edit this review if her condition does not drastically improve several weeks after quitting Sojos.
Obviously, your mileage may vary depending on your pet’s particular food sensitivities. Bowdu hasn’t been breaking out like Bowpi, so he is still getting the de-potatoed mix. But I’m throwing out what feels like a quarter of the contents to make this work for us. This wastefulness, in addition to the inconvenient reconstitution process (which has me serving cold food, not something I prefer to do except in summer months), is why I doubt I’ll be trying this brand of dehydrated dog food again.
Final Grade: B-
That’s a fair review. I have a bag of the veg mix sitting on top of my fridge for almost a year. Should toss it, but I hate to waste. My dogs got what Inu Baka called confetti poo. It was papered with bright orange and white veggie chunks. I will say that it is good for fatty dogs to help them feel full but not gain wt due to all the undigested bulk veg. This begs the question, do dogs really need that much veg? I don’t think so. I much, much prefer the easier to use and tastier Honest Kitchen as a veg meal.
Confetti poo is right! Not much of a party, though…
This mix does claim to be “complete,” but I feel much better adding more meat to it. Same with HK, which I liked way better than this. I wish HK came in 2 pound bags like Sojos, though.
Really interesting and thorough review. Thank you for taking the time to document everything. I have a bunch of sojo and honest kitchen samples, but I’ve never actually tried feeding them to Toki because I couldn’t really imagine going through the process of reconstituting her food every day. I would never have thought about the issue of uneven re-hydration. Have you contacted Sojos, and did they have any comment?
I haven’t contacted Sojos, but I would also be curious about what they say. I’ll put it on my to-do list (and probably will never get around to doing it, at this rate… ha!).
Reconstituting the food doesn’t have to be that bothersome, actually. With Sojos, I prepare it in about 3 day batches, leaving what I don’t use in the refrigerator. This is what they recommend, to save a bit of time. The most annoying thing to me is picking out the potatoes, but obviously that’s not an expected part of the process. =P
It’s another reason I prefer HK. It reconstitutes a lot faster, say 10-20 minutes, so I don’t feel the need to prepare it in large batches.
That’s too bad about the funky stuff and potatoes. I still want to give Honest Kitchen a try but haven’t found anyplace around here that carries it so I’m probably going to order some samples from their site sometime soon.
awesome review. my thoughts exactly – including the confetti poo! on any of these mixes (sojos, HK) their poo always seems more voluminous too. I assumed from all the carbs – which you confirmed with all the taters!
I was considering Sojo for Shio right before we started home cooked meals for Shio. Since meat was always the ingredient on the most heated debates list, I was going to go with Sojo’s dehydrated vegetarian mix and add in my own store bought meat.
After reading this review, I’m glad that I didn’t. Their website states that every bag has different rations of each vegetable, but the amount of potatoes in your bag seems a unreal. I wanted to buy the Sojo mix so that Shio would get all the necessary nutrients that he needed even on a homemade diet but that was clearly not achieved in your case!
I hope that poor little bowpi will get better soon!
Thanks for the heads up, Mac is about done with his bag of Orijen and I am starting to look around for options. B- after a review like this? You are too kind. =)
I guess I’m an easy grader. Though some of my students wouldn’t think so.
Mostly, I was keeping in mind the quality of the ingredients, which still make it a higher quality food than a lot of stuff out there, methinks. And since I’m still feeding it to Bowdu, it’s not fair to fail it.
I have a 4 yr old PW Corgi who was having terrible allergiy problems, both food and environmental as we found out after springing for the expensive testing. He is highly allergic to peas and potatoes (white potatoes; NOT sweet potatoes which shouldn’t even be called portatoes because they are much different than the white ones), plus chicken and other stuff. Peas and potatoes are key ingr. in all the “premium” kibbles that we had been feeding him. I went to our local very large pet food warehouse store which stocks pretty much all the high end kibbles. We read every label, and came away with ONE kind that did not have ingredients he wasn’t allegic too! That being a Solid Gold lamb based kibble. Well, he ate it (he’s a Corgi after all, and they are chow hounds) but you could tell he didn’t really enjoy it. The lady there recommended trying the Sojos Complete with turkey, as our dog was not even borderlin allergic to any of the ingredients. The idea of feeding our dog rqw meat kinda grossed me out, but I though what the heck. It’s a bit more expensive, but not much. OMG I can’t believe the difference. He gets insanely excited about eating now. We transitioned pretty quickly, and he had NO PROBLEMS what so ever. No tummy troubles, no nasty poop. The poster who was picking out the sweet potatoes may have a dog who is simply allergic to them. ( I now recommend just going ahead and getting your pet tested; that way you know what potential problems you’ll have.) He has stopped the insane scratching, itching, dandruff is gone, shedding is better, he has waaaayyyy more energy, he’s happier, and his coat is shiny and thick. I cannot say enough good things about this food. Btw, I find it much heavier on the broccoli than sweet potatoes.