The BEST Dog Food For Great Danes

To say that Great Danes are a unique breed would be a massive understatement. Coming in as one of the largest (in terms of height) dog breeds in the world, these gentle giants have some unique nutritional requirements.

If you are raising a Great Dane and you want them to be healthy, then you are going to need to invest in dog food that can meet their unique nutritional needs. To help make your job a lot simpler, we are going to be taking a look at the best dog food for Great Danes.

If you want a quick recommendation, we think that the best food is the Blue Buffalo Wilderness Rocky Mountain.

An Overview of the Best Dog Food For Great Danes in 2020:

Best Dog Food For Great Danes Reviewed:

Royal Canin Adult Dry Dog Food

For the first review on our best dog food for Great Danes list, we want to take a look at the Royal Canin Adult Dry Dog Food. This is a good way to start off our list for a few reasons. First off, Royal Canin is a relatively affordable dog food option.

Secondly, Royal Canin specializes in making dog food that appeals to and meets the needs of larger dog breeds, including Great Danes.

For starters, let’s talk about the flavor of this food. On this front, the food isn’t anything special. Instead of the more exotic flavors used by brands like Blue Buffalo and Taste of the Wild, Royal Canin has opted for the more traditional flavor of plain chicken.

While this can be an issue for Great Danes on certain diets and for those with picky palates, it can also be quite the blessing because chicken is easy to digest and appeals to a wide array of dogs.

Speaking of easy digestibility, that is something else that we have to mention, since that is another really positive aspect of this food. It is extremely easy for your dog to digest. While Great Danes aren’t known for having especially volatile digestive systems, but it never hurts to have an easy to digest food on hand. This can help to prevent upset stomachs and it can also be useful for helping a dog with an upset stomach to recover.

Overall, the Royal Canin Adult Dry Dog Food has a fairly good nutritional profile. The chicken helps to bring a healthy dose of protein to the food mixture. There is plenty of fiber in the food as well, which helps to improve your Great Dane’s digestive system. Perhaps most importantly of all, the food contains calcium and other nutrients that are designed to support the development of a healthy bone and joint system in your Great Dane.

Eukanuba Fit Body Large Breed Dry Dog Food

For the next review on our list, we have yet another dog food option that is geared towards very large dog breeds in the form of the Eukanuba Fit Body Large Breed Dry Dog Food. In addition to offering a great nutritional blend, this food also helps to promote a very healthy body type for your dog.

If that wasn’t enough, it also contains nutrients that help promote the growth and maintenance of bones and joints. So, this is definitely a good food option to feature on our best dog food for Great Danes list.

To kick off this review, we want to start by mentioning the long list of important nutrients that the Eukanuba Fit Body Large Breed Dry Dog Food brings to the table. First off, the food is full of what is called DHA. This is an important fatty acid that helps to keep your dog’s brain and nervous system functioning correctly. It is more important for puppies to get this nutrient, but it is also good to ensure that adult dogs have a steady supply as well.

Secondly, this food is chock full of L-carnitine and glucosamine. These two nutrients help to strengthen the bones, joints, and muscles. Furthermore, they help to promote the development of a lean, but healthy body for your Great Dane. Because of their immense size, one has to be careful about letting their Great Dane put on too much mass as it will really impact their joints. This food helps to ensure that your Great Dane develops the ideal body type for their breed. Finally, Eukanuba is full of helpful protein.

Much like the last dog food that we reviewed on our best dog food for Great Danes list, the Eukanuba Fit Body Large Breed Dry Dog Food isn’t anything special when it comes to flavor. It uses the very basic chicken flavor that you see a lot of other dog food brands use. As we said in a previous review, this is both a good and a bad thing.

It is a good thing because chicken has a very wide appeal and it is unlikely to cause digestive issues. It is a bad thing because chicken is sometimes a bit too bland for dogs and they will actually get tired of the food because of it.

Taste of the Wild High Protein Premium Dry Dog Food

Another brand that you will see get recommended a lot if you shop around for high-end dog food is Taste of the Wild. They are a brand that has a serious commitment to providing the highest quality dog food possible.

They use only the freshest, highest quality ingredients. So, we definitely wanted to make sure to include at least one entry from them on our best dog food for Great Danes list. We are going to be taking a look at the Taste of the Wild High Protein Premium Dry Dog Food.

So, if the name isn’t enough of a clue, we should tell you that Taste of the Wild’s main claim to fame is that they use extremely high-quality ingredients and rather unique types of meat. Rather than opting for traditional flavors like chicken or beef, Taste of the Wild instead offers flavors like bison and duck.

For example, the food that we are looking at it comes in a roasted venison and roasted bison flavor. These unique flavors can be great since they can appeal to even the pickiest of dogs. Also, the meat has a more unique nutritional profile. When compared to chicken or beef, bison and duck have a higher protein content and more fat (which is good for meeting your dog’s energy needs as well).

Another very important thing to keep in mind is that the Taste of the Wild High Protein Premium Dry Dog Food contains absolutely no artificial or filler ingredients of any kind. Everything in the dog food is completely real and of the best quality.

ACANA Dog Protein Rich Adult Dry Dog Food

Moving on with our search for the best dog food for Great Danes, we want to present to you the ACANA Dog Protein Rich Adult Dry Dog Food. This is yet another in the long line of high-quality dog food options that we are reviewing as part of this list. If you have been reading the other reviews on this list, then you probably have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Like all the other dog food options on our list, you can trust that the ACANA Dog Protein Rich Adult Dry Dog Food uses extremely high-quality ingredients. Depending on what flavor that you go for exactly, you can rest easy knowing that your dog will be getting real pieces of meat or fish.

The food also boasts a great nutritional profile. It contains plenty of carbs, fat, and protein. These help your Great Dane to both maintain muscle and to maintain a normal energy level.

Blue Buffalo Wilderness Rocky Mountain

For the final review on our best dog food for Great Danes list, we have decided to sort of save the best for last by taking a look at the Blue Buffalo Wilderness Rocky Mountain. Now, if you are completely new to the world of pet food, then the name Blue Buffalo is going to mean nothing to you.

If, however, you know something about pet food, then you know that Blue Buffalo is like the Rolls Royce of pet food, especially when it comes to dogs. They have a reputation for being pretty pricey (which is accurate), but they also have a reputation for having the quality to back that price up (which again, is an accurate assessment). So, this food definitely deserves to be on our list.

While you can probably already tell that we love this food, we need to go into a bit more detail to explain just how good Blue Buffalo Wilderness Rocky Mountain is. First off, in terms of the amount of nutrients contained in the food, it is hard to top Blue Buffalo. Why? Well, they make use of their own in-house blend of nutrients, which they refer to as “lifesource bits.”

These lifesource bits contain a blend of all major vitamins (from A to E), as well as several crucial minerals like iron, calcium, and more. All-in-all, this unique blend helps to make this one of the more nutritious options for your Great Dane.

Something else that is a hallmark of all Blue Buffalo food options is their ingredient quality. Blue Buffalo’s quality control is so high that you would assume that they were making food for people.

They include nothing in their food but the absolute highest quality pieces of beef, bison, duck, or whatever other meat the food happens to be based around. Absent from all Blue Buffalo food is any grains, any filler ingredients, and any artificial ingredients. This high ingredient quality can also impact the nutritional value of the food as well. By using actual, real pieces of high-quality meat, Blue Buffalo is able to pack a lot more protein into their food then if they used the lower quality meat that so many other dog food brands use.

Buying Food For A Great Dane

In the first part of our best dog food for Great Danes list, we provided in-depth reviews of various dog food options. Ideally, these reviews allowed you to pick out a food option that works for your Great Dane. In this second part of the article, we are going to focus more on what actually makes a particular food option good or not for a Great Dane.

Obviously, we covered this to some extent in the course of doing reviews. However, we wanted to clearly lay out the criteria to use for evaluating whether a food is a good option for a Great Dane or not.

What Makes Great Danes So Unique

The first thing that you need to understand if you are trying to understand what goes into picking out a good food for a Great Dane is what exactly it is that makes Great Danes such a unique breed. If you have ever seen one of these dogs in person before, then the answer is pretty apparent, it is their immense size. These dogs are among the largest in the world (they may be the largest according to some classifications).

As such, they simply have much larger nutritional requirements than other dog breeds that you may be more familiar with; this includes Golden Retrievers, Labrador Retrievers, German Shepherds, and other similar breeds. These extra nutritional needs take the form of an increased need for protein, carbs, and vitamins and minerals that boost the strength of the bones (calcium specifically).

What Needs To Be In My Great Dane’s Food?

Alright, so now that you know what makes these dogs so unique, let’s move onto talking about what should be in their food nutrient-wise.

Protein

A dog with such a big frame is going to need lots of muscle mass and strength to do even the most basic tasks. Things like getting up, walking around, and running will all require your Great Dane to have some serious muscles.

As we are sure you are all aware of, muscles require protein to grow and to maintain. So, one of the top priorities for you, as a Great Dane owner, is to find dog food that has a high protein content. This can be achieved by going for a food like Blue Buffalo or Taste of the Wild, both of which use very high-quality pieces of meat, and thus have a huge protein content.

Calcium (and other nutrients that are good for the joints)

A problem that all big dog breeds (Newfoundlanders, St. Bernards, and Great Danes to name a few) have, at least to some extent, is issues with their joints and bones. Again, the reason for this is going to be very obvious. These dogs have large frames, which means that they suffer from these sorts of issues.

Again, as a Great Dane owner, you need to help prevent this by investing in a food that has a lot of calcium in it, as well as any other nutrients that help to promote healthy joints and bones. It is also a good idea to look for a food like the Eukanuba Fit Body Large Breed Dry Dog Food, which promotes the growth of a “lean” body type. Less weight overall means less strain put on your dog’s joints.

Make Sure Good Ingredients Are Used

The last thing that you want to look for doesn’t have anything to do with Great Danes in particular, but it is a good thing to keep in mind whenever shopping for dog food in general. You want to make sure that the ingredient quality of the food that you buy is extremely high.

This means that you want to make sure that the quality of the meat used is very high. It also means making sure that things like artificial flavorings and preservatives are not used. Many will also want to make sure that there aren’t any filler ingredients in the food, as these are just empty calories with no nutritional value (they aren’t harmful).

Conclusion

Now you know that you need to make sure that your Great Dane is getting plenty of high quality Protein and Calcium. You also need to make sure that the food you buy uses high quality ingredients to ensure your Great Dane stays healthy and strong for as long as possible. We have checked and reviewed all 5 of the dog foods found in this article and be rest assured, your Great Dane will love any of them!

If you enjoyed our best dog food for Great Danes list or if you didn’t enjoy it, then we want to hear from you. Please leave us a comment letting us know what you thought.