When we first decided to carry a premium dog food at Bigwag Dog Bakery, we naturally chose Solid Gold for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that our sister store had been carrying Solid Gold for years and loved it, not to mention it was very popular in Illinois. Our journey with Solid Gold is a storied one, one that will shortly be coming to an end.
The very first challenge we faced was that there was not a distributor for Solid Gold anywhere in the area, they expected us to UPS the product from the closest location, which would have cost more than the small profit margin it afforded in the first place. We were determined, so we pressed on and found a distributor that would deliver it with a minimum order and thus Bigwag became a carrier of holistic dog food.
We didn't sell much of it, despite giving away hundreds of dollars in free samples. It didn't have a very big following in NWA, but we still believed in it and wanted to make a go of it. We fed our dogs a lot of SG that was close to expiring, but kept on with the belief that our customers deserved to be able to feed a high quality food.
With further research, we began expanded our line of high quality foods by adding Taste of the Wild and, more recently, expanding our Canidae selection. If anyone was at our birthday party last year, there was a good chance you won some premium food from us -Taste of the Wild and Canidae, because Solid Gold would not provide product for promotional events like this. In fact, by this time we had even stopped recieving samples.
The other foods we started carrying have been much more popular. Taste of the Wild is a great grain free food that is cheaper than Solid Gold. (Most Solid Gold is not grain free.) Plus, the results we have seen in our dogs have far exceeded those we saw with Solid Gold. Especially in Sam, who has very sensitive digestive track and often produced noxious clouds of nastiness when we weren't looking, something we haven't had a problem with since switching to Taste of the Wild.
We continued to carry SG, mainly at specific request, with our customers dwindling away and leaving us holding the bag (pun intended) of un-purchased dog food. Now, our the last regular SG customer has decided to purchace from Petco. Apparently SG has sold it's soul to Petco, and since SG has never been very easy to work with from a small business perspective, I wish them good luck.
You see, once a company like that goes to the big box retailers, it's impossible to get out. Soon the retailers start flexing their muscle (based on volume sales) to get better deals, better margins, lower prices. Before you know it, the manufacture starts skimping on ingredients, production methods and testing, and then blink - that product is marginally better than the mass produced, ingredients from China dog foods.
I think this will be a slow death for the Solid Gold company. They are basically thumbing their noses at the small retailers that they built their company on. We can't compete with Petco on price, so we aim to offer superior quality products you can't get anywhere else. We choose products like the chews made in the USA from animals raised in the USA - because we can feel confident selling them, because they're a product we can believe in. That's the whole premise of our store, really.
I think this degradation in quality standards on SGs part is already evident with the various recalls they have had on their canned foods and treats recently. Hopefully I'm wrong, and SG will remain a quality food that people can feel good feeding their dogs. But ultimately I believe the path they have chosen will become one of "not much better than average" but way more expensive.
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