Cheapest Grain-Free Dry Cat Food With an Ingredient Score Above 80

Taste of the Wild Lowland Creek, the quail and duck recipe, is the cheapest grain-free dry cat food on Pettings with an Ingredient score above 80. It scores 84 out of 100 and 9.8 out of 10 on nutrition, has nothing on the Avoid List, and the 14 lb bag works out to $2.86 per pound at Chewy. For a 10 to 14 lb cat that is about $15 a month.

The next cheapest food above 80 costs $1.03 more per pound. None of the 51 foods on our list that cost less than Lowland Creek scores above 72 on ingredients. Most of them contain grains; the grain-free ones are Earthborn Holistic Wild Sea Catch and Earthborn Holistic Primitive Feline.

Every Grain-Free Food Above 80, Cheapest First

11 grain-free dry foods on Pettings score above 80 on ingredients. Prices are for the cheapest bag per pound; each food page shows when its price was checked. This table updates when our data does.

The gap between the cheapest and Orijen Original Cat, one of the highest-scoring foods in the table, is 7 points on ingredients and $3.47 per pound. Put another way, Orijen Original Cat costs 2.2 times as much per pound for a score that is 8% higher.

Why the Cheapest One Scores 84

The Ingredient score weighs the first five ingredients at 70%, and Lowland Creek's first four are all named animal protein: duck, duck meal, turkey meal and chicken meal, 5 points each. Sweet potatoes come fifth at 2 points. That puts the top five at an average of 4.4 out of 5. The remaining 40 ingredients average 3.7. Most of them are vitamins, chelated minerals and probiotics, but lentils and peas come sixth and seventh: grain-free does not mean free of starchy plants.

The label lists no artificial colors, no BHA or BHT and no menadione, so the Avoid List count is zero. The chicken fat is preserved with mixed tocopherols, a form of vitamin E.

Protein and fat sit inside our adult target ranges. The carbohydrate estimate is the one soft spot: 28% is above our 25% ceiling, which is why the nutrition score is 9.8 rather than 10. The label does not list ash, so the estimate assumes 7%.

What the Extra Money Buys

The more expensive foods in the table do not all buy the same thing. Orijen Original Cat buys two. First, more of its meat is fresh rather than rendered: its first five are chicken, turkey, whole herring, turkey giblets and salmon, all whole meats, while Lowland Creek's are one fresh duck followed by three meals. A meal is meat cooked down with the water removed, so it carries more protein per pound than fresh meat; our score treats both as named animal protein and gives both 5 points. The difference shows further down the list, where Orijen adds dehydrated meats, organs and eggs. Second, less starch: Orijen's carbohydrate estimate is 20%, Lowland Creek's 28%.

The others are a mixed picture. Acana Highest Protein Wild Atlantic opens with whole fish and has one of the lowest carbohydrate estimates in the table, 14%. Both Instinct foods have lower carbohydrate estimates (19% and 18%), but their first five, like Lowland Creek's, are one fresh meat followed by meals. Wellness CORE has two fresh meats in its first five and a carbohydrate estimate of 16%. If you are keeping carbohydrates low, for example on your vet's advice, that column matters more than the ingredient score.

What you do not give up is the basics. Lowland Creek has nothing on the Avoid List, and it meets our protein and fat targets in full. Compared with Purina ONE Tender Selects Chicken, a food with grains at $1.90 per pound, corn protein meal in its first five and an ingredient score of 51, Lowland Creek costs $0.96 more per pound. Compared with Orijen, it costs $3.47 less per pound, for 8 percentage points more carbohydrate and mostly rendered rather than fresh meat at the top of the label.

What It Costs per Month

Price per pound is only half the story, because a calorie-dense food goes further. Lowland Creek has 3,558 kcal/kg (403 per cup). Using the maker's feeding chart (its rows are 5, 10 and 15 lb, so we read between them) and the 14 lb bag:

Orijen Original Cat has 4,120 kcal/kg, so a cat needs less of it. We have no feeding chart for it on file, so we estimate the amount from calories: about $20 and $31 a month for the same cats, rather than the $22 and $33 you would get by scaling the price per pound alone.

Buy the biggest bag you can store before it goes stale. The 5 lb bag of Lowland Creek costs $4.20 per pound, about half again as much as the 14 lb bag.

One caution before switching: if your cat has a health problem, talk to your vet first. Change foods over 7 to 10 days, adding a little more of the new food each day.

Wondering whether grain-free is worth it at all? Read Is Grain-Free Cat Food Bad for Cats?

Sources

• Pettings, How We Score: ingredient points, nutrition targets and the Avoid List.
• Pettings food pages linked in the tables above: scores, carbohydrate estimates, feeding amounts and prices, with the date each price was checked.
• Taste of the Wild, "Lowland Creek Feline Recipe with Roasted Quail & Roasted Duck": ingredients, guaranteed analysis, calories and feeding chart.
• Orijen, "Original Cat": ingredients, guaranteed analysis and calories.

Scores describe what the label says. They are not medical advice. We may earn a commission when you buy through store links; it does not change the order or what we recommend.