The scores
Wellness Soft WellBites Chicken & Lamb: B/78 — Above average. Named chicken and lamb lead, with no artificial colors, no BHA, and no by-products.
Milk-Bone Original Biscuit: D/38 — Below average. Wheat-flour-led panel with BHA, four artificial dyes, and rendered animal-protein sources.
How the ingredients compare
The top-five ingredients summarize the gap:
Wellness Soft WellBites: Chicken, Lamb, Chickpeas, Ground Potatoes, Vegetable Glycerin
Milk-Bone Original: Wheat Flour, Wheat Morsels, Meat and Bone Meal, Milk, Beef Fat (preserved with Tocopherols)
Wellness opens with two whole named animal proteins and uses chickpeas as the carbohydrate base. Milk-Bone opens with two forms of wheat (wheat flour, wheat morsels) and only reaches a protein source at position three — meat-and-bone meal, a rendered ingredient that combines unspecified mammalian sources at indeterminate inclusion. The downstream divergence is sharper. Milk-Bone’s panel includes poultry by-product meal, BHA (a preservative classified by the U.S. National Toxicology Program as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen”), sodium metabisulfite (sulfite preservative), and four FDA-permitted but rubric-deducted artificial colors: Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 2. Wellness’s preservation system is mixed tocopherols and rosemary extract — both natural, both rubric-neutral.
Where Wellness Soft WellBites pulls ahead
Named whole proteins: Chicken and lamb in positions one and two. Both are listed as the species-named whole muscle — not a meal, by-product, or rendered fraction. The treats rubric awards a meaningful protein-source bonus for this profile that Milk-Bone’s meat-and-bone meal forfeits entirely.
No artificial colors or BHA: Zero synthetic dyes (Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 2 are all absent), zero BHA, zero BHT. Per the U.S. National Toxicology Program and EU food-safety reviews, both BHA and the listed FD&C dyes carry rubric deductions for either documented carcinogenicity (BHA) or behavioral and allergenic concerns (the dyes). Removing them entirely is the single largest contributor to the score gap.
Calorie discipline: 8 kcal per WellBite vs 20 kcal per Milk-Bone Original Medium biscuit. For training use (high frequency, multiple treats per session), the lower per-piece calorie load matters — AAFCO supplemental-feeding guidance is to keep treats under 10% of daily calories, and a single Milk-Bone Medium is roughly 5% of a 25-pound dog’s daily intake on its own. Shop Wellness Soft WellBites on Amazon →
Where Milk-Bone holds its own
Milk-Bone’s strongest argument is price and shelf availability. A box of Milk-Bone Original Medium at most grocery and big-box retailers runs roughly a quarter to a third the per-pound price of Wellness Soft WellBites, and the brand is carried in nearly every grocery chain, drugstore, and supercenter that sells pet products. For households where the treat is a once-a-day reward rather than the main vehicle for daily training, the cumulative exposure to BHA and artificial dyes is small — a single Milk-Bone every other day is a different risk profile than ten per training session.
The biscuit format also has utility for slow chewers and dogs who prefer crunchy texture over soft. Wellness Soft WellBites is genuinely soft and breaks apart in seconds, which is what training requires but is not what every dog wants from a treat. Shop Milk-Bone on Amazon →
The bottom line
The 40-point rubric gap is real, and the reasons are not subjective: Wellness Soft WellBites uses named whole proteins and natural preservation; Milk-Bone uses wheat-and-rendered-meal panels with BHA and four artificial dyes. The price gap is also real — Wellness costs 3-4× per ounce. For occasional treating, Milk-Bone’s exposure profile is small enough not to matter much. For daily or training-intensive feeding, the panel-quality gap compounds and Wellness is the cleaner pick at any price.
Read our full reviews of Wellness Soft WellBites and Milk-Bone Original for the complete ingredient-by-ingredient breakdown.