We fact-checked five dog brands flooding your feed this August. One code’s legit. One story beats the product itself.
THE TL;DR
It’s National Dog Month — a real thing, sort of (more on that in a second) — which means your feed is currently one-third dog, one-third dog-brand ads, and one-third ads dressed up as dog content. We spent the week vetting five brands riding that wave. The gist:
- One brand’s hype is basically earned, full stop (Farm Hounds)
- One has a genuinely live 15%-off code worth using (Innovet Pet)
- One’s a plant-based dog food still proving itself, and mostly winning (Wild Earth)
- One just turned 30, got acquired, and lost its CEO — and is still a legit pharmacy (1-800-PetMeds)
- One is so small its own website still says “My Store” (Willow & I — we still kind of love it)
THE OPENER
Picture it: 94 degrees, your dog doing his best bathmat impression on the AC vent, and your feed deciding this is the exact moment to sell you eleven different “vet-formulated” chews. Welcome to National Dog Month — a 31-day marketing push that, plot twist, a treat brand invented back in 2020.
(Milk-Bone. It was Milk-Bone. We checked.)
That doesn’t make the dogs less good. It does mean August is peak season for pet brands to crank the hype dial to eleven. So this week we did the unglamorous part: read the ingredient panels, dug past the five-star reviews sitting on brands’ own sites, and called a few claims what they actually are.
Quick heads up: some links below are affiliate links — we may earn a small commission if you buy something, at no extra cost to you. It never changes our verdict. Full details in the fine print at the bottom.
🐾 EDITOR’S PICK — WILD EARTH
(Aggregated-review framing here, not firsthand testing. We didn’t feed this to a dog ourselves — we went deep on independent research instead.)
Wild Earth has been the “wait, vegan dog food?” brand since founder Ryan Bethencourt walked onto Shark Tank in 2018 and left with a $550,000 deal from Mark Cuban for 10% equity. The pitch: dogs are omnivores (cats aren’t — don’t extrapolate this to your cat), and Wild Earth’s koji-yeast protein is nutritionally complete without meat.
The Hype Audit: mostly earned. Independent reviewers — Dogster, Hepper, Canine Bible — land between 4 and 4.9 out of 5 stars, and the recurring theme isn’t just taste, it’s fewer allergy symptoms: less itching, cleaner ears, better coats.
Wild Earth‘s own site cites a survey of 1,368 owners claiming 86% saw health improvements — that’s brand-reported, so treat it as a data point, not gospel. What we could verify independently: zero recalls on record this year, real retail distribution through Walmart, Chewy, and Petco, and formulas built to meet AAFCO standards.
REAL TALK: the “adult maintenance” formula isn’t approved for puppies, and Reddit threads back that up — vets recommend a growth-stage food for young dogs. It’s also legume-heavy; that’s not the grain-free/DCM red flag specifically (Wild Earth isn’t grain-free), but worth a vet check-in if your dog has a heart condition.
Performance Formula runs $29.99, Maintenance Formula $24.99, and the site’s currently running 20% off your first order plus free shipping.
(Verified via brand site + independent reviews, Aug 2026)
⚡ HERO DEAL — INNOVET PET
Real, currently-live promo: code FLASH15 gets 15% off sitewide, confirmed on Innovet’s homepage this week. CBD Oil for Dogs runs $27.95, down from $32.95, before the code even hits.
REAL TALK: no CBD product for animals has FDA approval — not Innovet’s specifically, that’s true industrywide, and the agency has sent warning letters to companies in this space as recently as last year. The AVMA says CBD “appears to hold therapeutic promise” for things like anxiety and joint pain, but calls the evidence thin and mostly anecdotal. Ask your vet before you start.
Outside the science question, this is a real company: founded 2005 in Gardena, California, with third-party lab testing and published Certificates of Analysis. Its site cites a brand-hosted 4.9-star average across 12,000-plus reviews, which is self-reported, not independently audited.
Outside review sites are thinner and mixed — we found a genuine noise-phobia success story alongside a genuine complaint about a leaking bottle that dyed a customer’s hands blue.
The Hype Audit: overblown on the science, earned on the operations. If you’re trying pet CBD anyway, this is at least a well-tested product to try it with.
(Verified via brand site, FDA/AVMA guidance, and third-party review platforms, Aug 2026)
🌾 BRAND OF THE WEEK — FARM HOUNDS
If one brand’s hype is just… correct this week, it’s this one. Farm Hounds didn’t start as a treat company — it started in 2004 as an Atlanta dog daycare and boarding business, now a five-store retail chain called The Whole Dog Market.
In 2015, a farmer partner suggested making treats from the parts of pasture-raised animals that regenerative farms usually can’t sell — hides, organs, gizzards, tails. Farm Hounds was born from that leftover-not-waste idea, and it stuck: every bag names the single ingredient and the exact farm it came from. No ingredient panel needed, because there’s only one ingredient.
It’s not a story that only lives on the About page. Farm Hounds has landed on the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies list three years running — No. 273 in 2022, No. 683 in 2023, No. 1,112 in 2024 — and it’s sold in over 600 independent pet stores nationwide. Outside reviewers back it up: Amazon sits at 4.3 stars, Dogster gives it a full 5.
One honest caveat, and it applies to the whole chew category, not just this brand: hides, ears, and trachea chews need supervision. Any long-lasting chew carries some choking risk.
Prices run reasonable for the category — trachea chews start under $2, hide rolls from $8.49 — with free shipping over $75.
(Verified via brand site, Inc. 5000 records, and independent review platforms, Aug 2026)
💸 TIPS & HACKS — TWO WAYS TO ACTUALLY SAVE THIS MONTH
Use a real pharmacy, not a random reseller, for prescription meds. 1-800-PetMeds turns 30 this year — it was America’s first online pet pharmacy back in 1996, it’s accredited by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, and it’ll price-match a lower quote from another accredited online pharmacy.
It’s also had a rough stretch behind the storefront: it acquired PetCareRx for about $36 million in 2023, and in August 2025 its CEO and CFO both resigned, leaving board chair Leslie Campbell as interim CEO. Reviews are genuinely split — a BBB-accredited 4.19 out of 5 sits next to real, recent complaints about autoship double-charging and slow customer service elsewhere.
Our read: still a legitimate, licensed option, especially with the price-match guarantee and a current SUP20 code (20% off supplements, up to $20) — just don’t sleep on the reviews before setting up autoship.
(Verified via brand site, SEC filings, and BBB/consumer review platforms, Aug 2026)
For a cheap, no-frills chew, Willow & I is about as under-the-radar as this newsletter gets: a small, female-owned, Amazon-registered small business doing essentially one thing — grass-fed beef bully sticks sourced from Europe and South America. Its own storefront still carries the placeholder title “My Store,” which honestly tells you everything about how new this is.
We found no independent press and no recall history either way — treat it as genuinely unvetted, not endorsed or dismissed. If you try it, supervise the chew and size it to your dog, same as with any bully stick.
(Verified via brand site, Amazon listings, and a search for independent coverage — none found, Aug 2026)
THE ROUNDUP
Caption: how this week’s five brands stack up, ranked by how much the hype actually holds up.
BRAND HYPE VERDICT WORTH IT?
Farm Hounds – Earned – Yes
Wild Earth – Mostly earned – Yes, adult dogs
1-800-PetMeds – Earned (legit); overblown (service) – Yes, with caveats
Innovet Pet – Overblown (science); earned (ops) – Maybe — ask your vet
Willow & I – Too new to call – Yes, for basics
THE CHECKLIST — before you buy anything this week
- Check any “vet-formulated” or CBD health claim against what the FDA or AVMA actually says, not just the product page
- If a treat brand won’t tell you the specific farm or facility it sources from, that’s worth noticing
- Supervise chews — hides, bully sticks, trachea, all of it — regardless of brand
- Run a quick price-match or coupon check before you check out anywhere
- A tiny brand with no reviews isn’t automatically a red flag — it just means you’re the test group
THE SIGN-OFF
“Under-the-radar isn’t the same as bad — it just means nobody’s paid to tell you about it yet.”
That’s the whole ethos here. Go love on your dog this month, it’s basically mandatory now, Milk-Bone said so. If you try anything above, hit reply and tell us how it went — we read everything.
COMING UP
Next issue lands right before National Dog Day (August 26) — we’re digging into the “percentage of proceeds donated” claims that show up in every adoption-themed dog ad, and finding out how many brands actually publish the receipts.
FULL DISCLOSURE
This newsletter contains affiliate links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. We only feature things we’d genuinely recommend to a friend.
This issue was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI, under human editorial review.