Pet Food

Our Pet foods use the best ingredients to ensure the quality and taste that M&S is renowned for.

Together with our supplier, Irish Dog Foods, we’ve created an exceptional range of foods for your dog or cat. Irish Dog Foods is part of a major Europe-wide meat and food group, so they’re experts in quality meat and know the best practice pet food producers.

Standards

We apply the same high M&S standards of food production to our pet food suppliers as we do with any of our foods. There are some extra rules too and for these we follow the FEDIAF (The European Pet Food Industry Federation) guidelines and advice given by the PFMA Pet Food Manufacturers Association. Above all we know how precious your pet is to you and we personally visit our factories to ensure our strict standards are met.

Ingredients

Our supplier can trace all their meats and fish back to source to ensure we meet our quality, welfare and ethical standards and we only use responsibly sourced fish (using the MCS Fish On-line scoring system). 
When we say we have a particular meat or fish in the product, you can check the label to find out just how much. All our foil products contain 4% of the named meats described on the front, with at least 40% meat in the whole pack. The Organic range of dinners has 26% named meats with 36% or more meat inside. All our pet food is free from cereal derivatives from China or the USA, and all our complete meals are free from artificial flavours, colours and preservatives. We’ve even thought of you, by leaving out the ingredients that don’t smell so great!

Nutrition

Dogs and cats need good quality protein, fats, minerals and vitamins to give them everything they need for a full and active life.  Following leading standards in pet nutrition and advice from independent experts, we have prepared our whole range to give an adult dog or cat a complete meal with all the essential nutrients they need each day.  We’ve created a wide choice of meals, too, so you can vary what you feed your pet. After all, we’d all get bored eating the same thing every day!

Taste

We want your dog or cat to enjoy their food. We’re confident that with our carefully selected ingredients and great recipes, your dog or cat will really enjoy the whole range. How can we be sure? We enlisted the help of cats and dogs to try the meals in development – even our Pet Food Technologist has eaten the range!

Organic

We know that you want a choice of great products to feed your pet, so we’ve included a small range of organic products in our pet food, with 100% of the ingredients of agricultural origin from organic sources.  These are certified under the authority of the respected “Qualité France” and made for us in France by a family owned and run business where father and son are both vets! 

Packaging

More than ever we realise that the packaging we use must be recycled or recyclable wherever possible. Our tins and trays certainly are – along with the cardboard, and the film we use for treats. Our next target is the foil pouches and we have a company-wide project looking at alternatives.

Treats

Every good dog and cat deserves a treat sometime (though remember to give them responsibly as a part of your pet’s daily regime). Our simple but very tasty treats are made with high quality ingredients. We have just extended our range we already have some very tasty treats for dogs based on meat, and have now added a chopped sausage treat for cats. We recently added a new tasty biscuit treat, baked for your dog in the UK (these are really good for training younger dogs).  Now we offer a new dental treat for daily feeding, to help keep your dog’s teeth clean.

Water

You’ll see on every pack we remind you to provide plenty of fresh water for your pet to drink. It’s particularly important for cats and dogs to stay hydrated – just as it is for you.

A word on price

Buying pet food can be confusing - even worrying, as we all struggle to be sure we have bought the right thing. At M&S we have made this simpler for you, as all our complete meals are equally nutritious the only difference in price will be for additional features such as Organic (which is more difficult to make).

Understanding the labels

Aren't labels a pain? Pet food labels certainly can be! Currently there are strict rules for what can be stated on pack, and some of the words and phrases aren't like those on the rest of our products. We are working with the industry to move to simpler labelling (as we have across the rest of our ranges) to make things easier for you. Until then here is a guide to some of the most frequently asked questions:

  • Meat and Animal Derivatives - this literally means the meat or poultry that we add to the recipe, this is what characterises the flavour and aroma of the dish. In future we will describe these ingredients in this way: Beef . Beef Liver etc
  • Cereals - just a few of our wet food use a small amount of cereal products for cooking with the meats. In our dry products, we already list the cereals as ingredients like this: Oats. Wheat. Rice etc
  • Derivatives of vegetable origin – is the term used for plant fibres added to help digestion
  • Minerals - such as calcium, magnesium and some other essential minerals such as copper, iron and zinc: and just like vitamin supplements work for you, they work for your pet.





    Essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, plus added biotin and zinc all help maintain a visibly healthy coat.





    An optimal level of protein, plus a blend of vitamins, minerals, and natural cell antioxidants including vitamin E, helps support a healthy immune system





    As simple as stated; no artificial colours, flavourings or preservatives are present in the food.





    The high quality food ingredients selected for all the products give many benefits.  One of those is an excellent nutrient absorption from the quality ingredients, leading to high digestibility.

    And in the Analysis box:

  • Moisture - this is important as your pet gets some of the water they need from their food (although they always need a supply of fresh water every day)
  • Ash - we don't add ash! This is a scientific term to describe the minerals after analysis.


    Dry Food Option

    Our supplier has developed a great dry food for cats, and one for dogs too. It has all the complete nutrition you’d expect, formulated using all the latest thinking on pet health - and it is made in the UK.