We have now scored the whole aisle. Here is the honest spread.

Why we use four rubrics, not one

You might expect one master scorecard, but a fish-oil capsule and a dental chew cannot be graded the same way, so each category gets its own deterministic, auditable methodology. Dog food and cat food share a five-dimension model, with cat-specific bands where a cat's biology demands them. Supplements are scored on tiered published evidence, the actual research, not the promise on the bottle. Treats run on their own clarity, caloric-load, and claim-honesty rules. Different products, different yardsticks, on purpose.

What stays the same underneath is the part that protects you. In every category, all five sub-scores trace back to label data and public records, the math runs identically for every product, and no human gets to overrule the engine to do a brand a favor. If you want to check our work, it is all open: the platform methodology hub, and the category pages for dog food, cat food, supplements, and treats.

What the scores actually look like

Score enough of an aisle and a pattern appears, and it is a humble one. Most foods and treats sit in the middle, and almost every one carries a real catch you would want to know about: a strong food that costs a lot, a clean treat that makes no dental claim it can back up, a well-sourced recipe that barely tells you what is in it. A handful earn the top band honestly. None have cleared a 9. That is not us being stingy by accident, and it is the kind of ceiling worth understanding before you shop; we explain it in why nothing scores a 10.

If you are looking at supplements, expect lower numbers than food and treats, and that is the rubric doing its job for you. The gate there is published evidence, not how confidently a bottle promises a glossy coat or a calmer dog. When the controlled trials do not back an ingredient, no amount of clean labeling or careful manufacturing can rescue its score, so the whole shelf grades lower. Cat food has a pattern of its own, which we walked through in the cat food spread.

Cheap and good are two different questions

The finding that surprises shoppers most is that price and quality do not move together the way you would assume. The same grocery-aisle food often lands at the bottom for overall quality and at the top for Value, at once. That is not a mistake. Our Value sub-score asks what you get for your money, and we deliberately do not dock a food for being affordable. A cheap, complete-and-balanced food that feeds your animal at a low cost per 1,000 kcal earns its Value points fair and square, even if the rest of its report card is ordinary.

We could mash those two numbers into a single tidy verdict, but that would hide the exact trade-off you are weighing at the shelf. So we show you both and let you decide what your animal and your wallet need most. If price is the lever you care about, the best value list ranks foods on that question alone, kept separate from overall quality.

What a score will not do for you

Before you lean on a number, know what it is not. A PetScored score is our opinion under a published rubric, so it cannot stand in for your vet: it will not tell you whether a food suits your particular animal with its particular condition. It is not a safety guarantee either, a high score does not promise a product will never be recalled, and a low one is not us calling it unsafe. And it is not a popularity contest. Ad budgets, brand loyalty, and piles of five-star reviews do not nudge the math one bit.

You will also notice some products simply are not here. When we cannot pin down a price, a recipe, or a claim well enough to stand behind a number, we leave the product out instead of guessing, and we tell you which ones on the what we refuse to score page. That is the whole point of trusting us: you get a smaller, honest catalog rather than a bloated one padded with numbers we cannot defend. How we hold ourselves to that is spelled out on our trust and independence page.

- The PetScored desk. Want to see how it all fits together before you shop? Start with the platform methodology, then go find your own animal's food in dog food, cat food, supplements, and treats.