Editorial · PetScored desk · June 4, 2026
Is Badlands Ranch dog food worth it?
If you are eyeing Badlands Ranch for your dog, here is the short version, in our view: the formula really is meat-forward, the food is fine for what it is, and the catch is the price. It makes the most sense for a small dog, or as a topper you sprinkle on regular food. On the PetScored rubric, Badlands Ranch Superfood Complete Beef scores 6.2, with a Value sub-score floored at 2out of 10. And one thing to get out of the way, since you have probably run into it: the “Badlands Ranch recall” floating around online does not appear in the FDA recall database. We unpack that below.
What you are actually buying
Superfood Complete is air-dried, which means the meat and organs are dried “low and slow” instead of being cooked into kibble. Open the Beef recipe and the first ingredients you read are beef, beef heart, beef liver, and salmon, and the brand markets it as 87 percent animal ingredients. The box of percentages on the back, what the label calls the guaranteed analysis, backs up a high-protein, high-fat profile (roughly 33 percent protein and 30 percent fat as fed, near 12 percent moisture). That is why Nutrition Fit reads strong on our rubric. The named organs are the real draw here, and the rubric gives them credit.
Who is behind it
You have probably seen the name attached to a familiar face. Badlands Ranch was co-founded by the actress and animal advocate Katherine Heigl, and the brand leans on that association in its marketing. Behind the scenes it sits under Golden Pet Brands, the same group behind Dr. Marty Pets, with roots in the direct-response marketing company Golden Hippo. The food is made in a facility the company owns in Germantown, Wisconsin that carries a high food-safety rating. That is a genuine trust signal, and we give it credit.
The credential picture looks a lot like its sibling brand, and it is worth knowing before you buy. We could not find a publicly named board-certified veterinary nutritionist behind the formula. Superfood Complete is also “formulated to meet” the AAFCO adult-maintenance profile rather than proven through feeding trials, the more demanding standard where the food is actually fed to dogs and checked. Adult maintenance carries one more practical catch: it is not formulated for puppies or for pregnant and nursing dogs. None of this is disqualifying. It is simply the kind of detail the ad skips and the rubric does not.
About that “recall”
If you searched the brand and landed on a scary headline, you are not imagining it. Several search-optimized blogs describe a “January 2026 voluntary recall” of Badlands Ranch, right down to a lot number and a class. So we went looking. It does not appear in the FDA recall and withdrawal database or the FDA enforcement reports, and independent recall trackers show no recall on file for the brand either. We could not verify it, which means we do not treat it as fact, and you should not feel you have to either. If a verified recall ever does land, our recall index and the brand’s scorecard will reflect it with a cited source. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is why we are flagging this rumor here instead of repeating it as if it were true.
The catch: what it costs to fill the bowl
Here is where the math gets real for you. Air-dried food is concentrated and expensive, and the Value sub-score of 2is where that lands on our rubric. Run the brand’s own numbers, about 430 kcal per cup, against its feeding chart, and a standard bag lasts a medium dog only a day or two as their entire diet. In practice that puts the daily cost into the tens of dollars and the monthly cost into the hundreds. So if your dog is medium or large, feeding this as the whole meal gets pricey fast. Like other premium air-dried and freeze-dried foods, a lot of owners use it as a topper instead, which is a sensible way to get some of the ingredient quality without paying for a full diet.
So, is it worth it?
In our opinion, it depends on your dog and your budget. If you have a small dog, or you want an air-dried, organ-rich recipe to use as a topper, and the price does not put you off, Badlands Ranch Superfood Complete earns its place. If you are looking for an everyday full diet for a medium or large dog, the cost becomes the deciding factor, and the 6.2 reflects exactly that: a good formula running into an unforgiving Value benchmark. One last thing to hold onto as you decide. The celebrity name and the heavy advertising are not evidence in either direction. What you can trust is the label and the price.
- The PetScored desk. Want to go deeper? See the full Badlands Ranch Superfood Complete scorecard, check any brand’s status in the recall index, or put it side by side with another food at /compare.