Prior to Jensen's adoption I did a ton of research on what food is quality but isn't terribly expensive and we landed on "Nulo." We've been feeding him both their dry and wet varieties since his adoption, and for dry food we've never broken away from the "Indoor Cat - Turkey & Chicken" recipe (outside of a brief stint where my wife was given a free bag of Iams) as our vet warned against mixing proteins and the "Indoor Cat" variety is apparently less caloric for indoor kitties that would generally be less active than those that are outdoors from time to time.
Well, we're running low and it's time to buy another bag. I thought I'd give him something new to try, so we stopped by a local pet store instead of our usual Petsmart run to check their inventory and pricing, as Nulo has two lines, the "Medal Series" which is Petsmart exclusive, and "Freestyle", which is sold by a bunch of different online and local retailers.
We settled on the "Adult Trim - Salmon & Lentils" flavor, as we know our boy likes salmon, and while he's not a proper chonk, our vet always says he could lose a bit of weight, so I figure it certainly couldn't hurt.
When I pulled the bag from the shelf, I noticed it was a bit dusty, so I decided to check the expiration date. Annoying it read 30 NOV 2020. The clerk offered us either a discount or to call another location to hold us a bag, and I ain't about to feed my boy expired food, so we opted for the hold offer.
We did a quick Trader Joe's shopping run (which was next to the original pet store in question) and then headed over to the other pet store. We saw a few kitties up for adoption (and a few that were marked as adopted, which was nice to see) including one poor boy that had chronic ear infections and would constantly be tilting his head, and then headed over to the register to pick up the food.
Annoyingly, this one was expired too. it was actually 30 DEC 2020 if I remember correctly. I went over to the shelf and grabbed another bag of the same food and it too was expired, but it was actually all the way back in JUN 2020. I was half-tempted to just leave the store out of frustration (and concern for inventory practices) at that point, but we were there, we needed the food, and it was actually a few dollars less than the Petsmart equivalent or even what Chewy was selling it for.
In the end we ended up with a "Duck & Lentils" recipe. It's an indoor variety, which is okay, but I would have preferred the salmon, "Adult Trim" option. Oh well, maybe next time.
www.resetera.com
