I have heard many shocking stories like this from people across the country. As a dog owner it’s so sad to hear these stories. So I decided to do something about it - last October I began buying hundreds of bags of popular dog food to do independent lab testing on them. I worked with veterinary experts to research and document every single ingredient that is used in dog food today. I also document every reported recall each company had. I even personally spent weeks calling every single company asking intrusive questions about their quality and manufacturing standards to test their transparency. Hill’s products scored shockingly low, as did many other bestselling brands. I only wish I had started this journey years ago so these sad experience could have maybe been prevented.
All of this research was done to show pet owners a simple quality score for all dog foods. Dog owners have a right to know which foods are bad and what alternatives exist in their budget. The result of all this research is a free public service website called www.watchdoglabs.com. It’s 100% independent from dog food companies, accepting no ads or sponsorships of any kind - the goal is not to profit but to help as many dogs as possible. Just a small team of volunteers and experts who love pets and want the industry to improve.
If this is a cause you believe in and think the website could be helpful to others, please share your feedback and share the site with friends.
Thank you for reading and for your time! If you have dog food questions, I am happy to be a resource for you.
Huge compliments to your decision to hide price info behind the referral link. You take a key piece of information and tie an incentive to the action of getting referred, resulting in a higher click through rate to your links. Smart! Also, this allows you to not have to constantly update the price on your Webflow site as they fluctuate on Amazon or other sources (which may have been why you did it in the first place). Either way, love your mission and your design. Kudos. One thing I’d recommend is making a quick, fun logo to replace your current one!
Hi Vincent, thanks for your friendly words. The search is vanilla Webflow (just made the images larger and full-width text). Webflow also automatically ads the search term to the URL so if you want to look up Purina it’s easy to link to that dog food Search Results
The filters on the home page are custom code and also use Firebase + Canner to manage the products. Other pages like the educational posts here Learn About Dog Food | Watchdog Labs are simply managed either as static pages or the Webflow CMS.
Hi there, I have good news for you! As we gather funding we will cover cat food next. both dog and cat food vary wildly in quality, you wouldn’t believe what some of these foods contain and how low the quality regulations really are. It’s scary stuff! I hope the site gets shared and people start using it. Right now I am working on adding a lot more dog foods. Cats are next though
Two reasons to let people check the price on Amazon:
The price changes all the time and I hate to provide wrong information.
the site is a free public service that is funded by commissions if people buy any food from Amazon (it doesn’t cost them more to buy it, Amazon shares a small percentage). this allows the site to (hopefully have a small, self-funded budget) which very importantly makes it 100% financially independent from all ads, sponsorships, free food samples etc. The goal is to prevent any possible bias.
Do you have an example of the type of fun logo you have in mind?
Got you Nutro was very open and transparent about their manufacturing practices when we reached out to them and also did well on controversial ingredients and meat/fat quality.
Thanks for sharing @webdes. I’m doing some prototyping and looking for ways to do facet searches. Canner + firebase were not on my radar until reading this discussion.
If this is a cause you believe in and think the website could be helpful to others, please share your feedback and share the site with friends.
