Is Dr. Marty dog food worth it? What the label shows.

What you are actually buying

Nature’s Blend is a freeze-dried raw dog food, which means the meat and organs are gently dried so the bag sits shelf-stable until you add water back in. The Essential Wellness recipe opens with named animal proteins, turkey, beef, salmon, and duck, plus beef and turkey liver. That is exactly the kind of front-of-panel a label-driven rubric rewards, and you can see it in the score: Nutrition Fit and Sensitivity Risk both read well. So the meat is never the problem here. What you are weighing is the price and the paperwork behind it.

Who is behind the name

The name on the bag belongs to Dr. Martin Goldstein, a veterinarian who earned his DVM from Cornell in 1973 and built his name in integrative and holistic veterinary medicine. That is a real career. But if you are buying partly on that authority, it is worth knowing exactly what the credential is and is not: per his own clinic biography, he is not a board-certified veterinary nutritionist (the credential vets shorthand as DACVN) and holds no PhD in animal nutrition. The brand’s public materials do not name a board-certified nutritionist on staff. For a food sold heavily on the authority of its namesake, that distinction is one we think matters, and our methodology treats “a vet’s name on the bag” and “a board-certified nutritionist behind the formula” as two different things. If you want the longer version of why those are not the same, see why “vet-recommended” usually means nothing.

Behind the name is a corporate structure worth knowing too. Dr. Marty Pets sits under Golden Pet Brands, the pet division tied to the direct-response marketing company Golden Hippo. The brand brought manufacturing in-house with a freeze-dry facility in Wisconsin in 2023 and a Nebraska plant acquisition in 2026. That last part is good news for you as a buyer: owning the plant is a genuine trust signal, and the rubric gives it credit.

What the label proves

The box of percentages, the part the label calls the guaranteed analysis, is dense, the way freeze-dried raw tends to be: crude protein around 37 percent and crude fat around 27 percent as fed, against roughly 6 percent moisture. Pour the water out in your head, what the industry calls a dry-matter basis, and you are looking at a high-protein, high-fat food. That named-meat panel earns the Nutrition Fit and Sensitivity reads it gets. Where it slips is Ingredient Clarity, which sits at 5. The recipe stacks several animal proteins plus egg and pea flour near the top, so if your dog is avoiding common triggers, that is a lot to pick through.

Here is one paperwork detail the marketing does not put up front. Nature’s Blend is “formulated to meet” the AAFCO nutrient profiles, not substantiated by AAFCO feeding trials. In plain terms, the recipe is built on paper to hit the targets rather than tested by feeding it to dogs. Formulated-to-meet is the more common, lower-cost route, and it is not a flaw. It is just a weaker form of evidence than a feeding trial, and our rubric scores that difference instead of the advertising around it.

The catch: what it costs to actually feed

This is where the score really comes from, so it is the part to slow down on. Freeze-dried raw is extraordinarily expensive per calorie, because what you are really paying for is the work of removing water and shipping concentrated meat. Run the brand’s own feeding chart against retail pricing and feeding Nature’s Blend as your dog’s only food lands in the tens of dollars per day for a medium dog. That is roughly ten times what mid-range kibble costs to feed. That single fact is why the Value sub-score floors at 2.

And there is a tension worth flagging before you buy. The product is labeled complete and balanced, yet the brand itself frequently suggests using it as a topper over regular food to keep the cost manageable. In our view those two ideas pull against each other: a food sold as a full diet, paired with feeding guidance that quietly assumes you will not feed it as one. None of that makes it a bad food. It just means the way it realistically fits into your routine is narrower than the bag suggests.

The recall and billing record

On safety, credit where it is due: as of this writing we found no FDA recalls for Dr. Marty in the past five years in the FDA recall database. The cautions we think are fair to raise are about the buying experience, not the food. As of June 2026, the brand’s Better Business Bureau file showed a pattern of complaints about subscription billing and cancellation, which is a common friction point with direct-to-consumer auto-ship models. The practical takeaway for you: if you buy, read the subscription terms before that first automatic reorder hits.

So, is it worth it for you?

In our opinion, it comes down to which buyer you are. If you have a small dog, or you plan to use it as a deliberate topper, you value a named-meat freeze-dried recipe, and the budget is there, this food earns its place. If instead you are looking for an everyday complete diet for a medium or large dog, the cost gets hard to justify when other foods score just as well on nutrition without the Value penalty. The 6.2 is not a knock on the meat. In our view it is the rubric pricing in what the food costs to feed and the thin nutrition credentials behind the brand.

- The PetScored desk. Want to see the math behind that number? The full Dr. Marty Nature’s Blend scorecard lays out the sub-score trail. To get sharper at this yourself, read how to actually read a dog food label, or browse every food we have scored at /dog-food/browse. If you are weighing a celebrity-name brand from the grocery aisle instead, we put two of them Rachael Ray Nutrish vs Blue Buffalo head to head.