Background: ownership, sourcing and positioning
Big Dog and Wellness CORE offer two different approaches to the Australian cat food market. Big Dog builds its recipes from named meat, offal and ground bone with whole-food vegetables, kelp and marine algae rather than a synthetic premix. Wellness CORE is built on a grain-free, animal-protein-first philosophy spanning kibble, 79g cans and 50g pouches. The two brands differ in several ways beyond the one point highlighted here.
Big Dog is made in Queensland as raw frozen patties, across five mixed-protein cat recipes of meat, offal, bone and fresh whole foods. It is an early Australian pioneer of the BARF raw feeding movement, now widely stocked frozen through major and independent retailers.
Wellness CORE makes its dry kibble in the United States while the wet cans and pouches are made in Thailand. It is owned by the private equity firm Clearlake Capital, which acquired it from Berwind Corporation in 2020, and markets itself as the largest independent North American pet food maker.
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