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

What it is

Nature’s Blend is a freeze-dried raw dog food: meat and organs gently dried so the bag is shelf-stable until you rehydrate it. The Essential Wellness recipe leads with named animal proteins - turkey, beef, salmon, and duck, plus beef and turkey liver - which is exactly the kind of front-of-panel a label-driven rubric rewards. That shows up in the score: Nutrition Fit and Sensitivity Risk both read well. The catch is never the meat. It is the price and the paperwork.

Who is behind it

“Dr. Marty” is 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 it is worth being precise about the credential: per his own clinic biography, he is not a board-certified veterinary nutritionist (a 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 matters, and our methodology treats “a vet’s name on the bag” and “a board-certified nutritionist behind the formula” as two different things. See why “vet-recommended” usually means nothing for the longer version.

On the corporate side, 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. Owned manufacturing is a genuine trust signal, and the rubric credits it.

What the label proves

The guaranteed analysis is dense, as freeze-dried raw tends to be: crude protein around 37 percent and crude fat around 27 percent as fed, against roughly 6 percent moisture. On a dry-matter basis that is a high-protein, high-fat food, and the named-meat panel earns the Nutrition Fit and Sensitivity reads it gets. Where it loses ground is Ingredient Clarity, which sits at 5: the recipe stacks several animal proteins plus egg and pea flour near the top, so a dog avoiding common triggers has a lot to navigate.

One paperwork detail the marketing does not lead with: Nature’s Blend is “formulated to meet” the AAFCO nutrient profiles, not substantiated by AAFCO feeding trials. Formulated-to-meet is the more common, lower-cost route, and it is not a flaw, but it is a weaker form of evidence than a feeding trial, and our rubric scores the difference rather than the advertising.

The catch: cost per calorie

This is the whole story of the score. Freeze-dried raw is extraordinarily expensive per calorie, because you are paying to remove water and ship concentrated meat. Using the brand’s own feeding chart and retail pricing, feeding Nature’s Blend as a dog’s sole diet runs into the tens of dollars per day for a medium dog - an order of magnitude more than mid-range kibble. That is why the Value sub-score floors at 2.

There is a tell worth naming. The product is labeled complete and balanced, but the brand itself frequently suggests using it as a topper over regular food to make the cost manageable. In our view those two ideas are in tension: a food sold as a full diet, with feeding guidance that quietly assumes you will not feed it as one. None of that makes it a bad food. It makes it an expensive one whose realistic use is narrower than the bag implies.

The recall record

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 fair-to-cite cautions are commercial, not safety: the brand’s Better Business Bureau file shows a pattern of complaints about subscription billing and cancellation, which is a common friction point with direct-to-consumer auto-ship models. If you buy, read the subscription terms before the first reorder.

Bottom line

In our opinion, Dr. Marty Nature’s Blend is worth it for a specific buyer: someone feeding a small dog, or using it as a deliberate topper, who values a named-meat freeze-dried recipe and has the budget for it. As an everyday complete diet for a medium or large dog, the cost is hard to justify against foods that score as well on nutrition without the Value penalty. The 6.2 is not a knock on the meat. It is the rubric pricing in the cost and the thin credentials behind the brand.

- The PetScored desk. See the full Dr. Marty Nature’s Blend scorecard for the sub-score trail, read how to actually read a dog food label, or browse every scored food at /dog-food/browse.