What makes a koi food a good koi food?

[aquitori]

What makes a koi food a good koi food?

[dick benbow]

quality ingredients, fairly priced, and an expiration date plain to see. Then it's up to us to be sure and feed the right % of protein for the current temperature or maybe when to stop feeding.....

[koinut]

Quote: Originally Posted by aquitori What makes a koi food a good koi food?

For me it's always been the way it tastes.

[Regenmeneer]

As Dick pointed out, quality ingrediënts are very important, and to be as fresh as possible. So a half year expiration date at most. It should be appropriate for the watertemperature as far as protein %. I do not believe in all year foods, since they either have to much protein for winter conditions or not enough for summer time. The food should not fall apart in the water, create as little floating particles as possible, should not color the water. It should not change Shiroji into a yellowish white. And above all, when eaten by koi, it should produce solid waste.

Regenmeneer

[Clay]

These threads come up every couple of months and I always find them interesting. What makes a quality food is not marketing or a 4 color photo on the bag of food.

The thing that made me write a comment on this thread was Koinut's comment: "For me it's always been the way it tastes." I understand that the comment was in a joking light but I remember when Chris Neaves made a comment about fish attractant being added to many koi foods. With attractant added your koi would eat styrofoam and you might think that it is good for them since they eat it aggressively. My children eat Twinkies aggressively, but it doesn't mean that they are good for them.

It boils down to ingredients. It is the ingredients but the sellers of food don't make it easy for us to find out the real ingredients since there are no laws (or rather meaniful laws) governing labeling requirements on pet food. Until this happens, it is about smoke and mirrors and marketing.

There is also a real psychological phenomenon which directs our oppinion of something on which we spent a lot of money. If you paid $40/ Kg on a food you tend to rate it higher than a food on which you spent less. We all tend to self reinforce our actions.

I always wanted a large organization like the AKCA to send many different foods out to a lab and do a testing on composition and print the facts. Since these magazines / publications rely on advertising dollars this won't happen.

Personally, I like established companies that have been around a while and have a good R&D department. One of the companies that meets my self imposed requirement is Hikari. I like their products. There are other good foods available, but they are not easy to discover.

Rick