Wellness Core to Complete Health Grain Free – How To Change Dog Food #GrainFreeForMe
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This post is sponsored by Wellness® Natural Pet Food and the BlogPaws® Pet Influencer Network™. I am being compensated to help share Wellness Grain Free options, but we only share information we feel is relevant to our readers. Wellness is not responsible for the content of this article.
We were excited to hear that Wellness® is now offering a grain free option with their baseline product line Wellness Complete Health™ Dog Food. We were already happy customers of the Wellness Core® Grain Free line of dog food as we believe transitioning to the Wellness Grain Free product helped Stetson with his skin allergies.
After we had a chance to research the new reinvented line of Wellness Complete Health we began putting a game plan together for changing Archer to a new dog food.
How To Change Dog Food
We’ve had a lot of experience transitioning our puppies to different dog foods. We have some general guidelines we’d like to outline for you, but don’t take this as hard rules (be flexible) as we’ve noticed that every puppy is different when it comes to stomach sensitivity and how they will react to changing foods.
Before you transition to a new dog food make sure you have enough of your current food to feed your puppy for the next 7 days. The basic premise is you want to switch foods gradually by mixing a small amount of the new food with the current food. Over 6-8 days slowly increase the amount of new food while decreasing the amount of current food until you eventually are feeding only the new food.
Here was the feeding schedule I laid out for Archer who was eating 2 cups of Wellness Core Grain Free 2x a day.
This was our projected per meal servings:
- Day 1 & 2: 1.5 cups Wellness Core + 0.5 cups Wellness Complete Health
- Day 3 & 4: 1 cup Wellness Core + 1 cup Wellness Complete Health
- Day 5 & 6: 0.5 cups Wellness Core + 1.5 cups Wellness Complete Health
- Day 7: 2 cups Wellness Complete Health Grain Free Dog Food!
Be prepared to improvise as some dogs can transition to new foods quicker while others may take longer as we saw when changing Archer’s dog food.
Archer’s Experience Going From Wellness Core to Wellness Complete Health Dog Food
We were moving Archer from Wellness Core Grain Free Dog Food to the new reinvented Wellness Complete Health Grain Free Dog food and because this was two foods from the same brand we were hoping for an easy transition. Wellness also touts a combination of healthy fiber, chicory root extract and probiotics in their food which helps support healthy digestion. We followed the guidelines outlined above, but unfortunately it didn’t go exactly as planned.
We fed Archer 0.5 cups of Complete Health and 1.5 cups of Core for his first meal, but it resulted in soft poops. We didn’t want things to worsen going into the evening so we changed our plan and gave Archer a quarter cup of Complete Health and one and a three quarter cups of Core. This worked much better and Archer had a nice solid poop that evening.
Instead of following the above guideline which had worked for most of our past puppies we scrapped the game plan, improvised, and slowed down our transition to Wellness Complete Health Grain Free. Slowing down the transition worked much better and after about 8-10 days Archer was doing great with his new food.
Archer is now happily eating Wellness Complete Health Grain Free Dog Food and our other pup’s are currently still eating Wellness Core Grain Free. Does your puppy eat grain free recipes? Tell us about your dogs and the food they eat in the comment section below.
The Wellness Complete Health Line of dog food and Wellness Core Grain Free can be purchased at your local PetSmart. Wellness has given us a $3.00 off coupon for our readers.
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Does your pet eat grain-free recipes? Post a pic of you & your pet using #GrainFreeForMe!
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Wellness® Natural Pet Food. The opinions and text are all mine.
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I’m definitely not a nutrition expert, but one of the big areas that I noticed when researching is Core had more protein then the Complete Health Formula. One of my initiatives this year is to learn more about dog foods and nutrition since I know it’s an important part of a dog’s health. A site that I often refer to that might be helpful in your research is dogfoodadvisor.com.
So what is the actual difference between the two? I’m having a hard time finding that out and deciding between which to buy.
Thank you for asking. This is a sponsored post and we were offered compensation and a free supply of Wellness Complete Health Grain Free food to try for a short period of time. Wellness is a brand we trusted and have enjoyed with our pets for several years and we wanted to try some of their other products. As I recall the Complete Health line had just moved to Grain Free at the time of this writing and that was one of the prerequisites we had for dog food. Moving to grain free with Stetson seemed to help his allergies and along with the offer from Wellness along with a more affordable grain free dog food from a brand we trusted was something we didn’t want to pass up. Hopefully that helps with your decision.
Can I ask what your reason for switching from Wellness Core Grain Free to Wellness Complete Grain Free food was? The foods seem very similar but we were considering doing the same. What were the results over the last month or so? Thanks!
I’m going to have to get on their email list for the monthly coupons. We’re feeding our dogs Wellness Core Grain Free and Wellness Complete Health Grain Free.
i use Holistic Select, no grain, sardines which is made my wellness. if you sign up for Wellness or Holistic select emails, they send you coupons every month. usually 3.00 but sometimes 5.00. they have great customer service as well. in some areas they offer free bags for buying a certain amount of bags.
I thought we normally moved from puppy food to adult food earlier, but I just checked one of my manuals and it says to move from puppy to adult food at 12 months of age.
Linus is our picky eater and he almost always cleans out his bowl. We’re doing work on the yard and our contractor keeps telling me how good our dog’s coats look. I’m not sure if that’s related to the food we’ve been feeding, but it’s nice to hear.
Ace is eating the Wellness Core wild game and seems to be doing well on it. I plan to keep buying it for him for now. I never know with him because he seems to have random allergies. My puppy is on a different brand for now. At what age do you typically switch your pups from puppy food to adult food?
My dogs also eat Wellness. One of them has skin allergies and the Wellness dog food seems to be minimizing/eliminating the itchiness he feels and his skin is clearing up. Our other dog is a picky eater and usually leaves some extra bites in his bowl, but after switching to the Wellness dog food he eats it all!