Crested Gecko Diet Taste Test

I lined up 19 flavours of crested gecko diet from five companies, mixed each one, and tasted them. This is about how they taste to a person, not a feeding guide: the geckos' opinion is what matters. Don't eat gecko food at home.

My first lesson: bring water. I didn't, and ended up washing the insect-based ones down with blueberries and lemonade.

Repashy

• Mango Super Blend: not good, but not bad. Quite mango, with an odd texture almost like peanut butter.
• Crested Gecko Classic: Repashy was the first manufactured gecko diet. It tastes a bit like sour Skittles, as if Skittles could go rotten. Comparatively not bad.
• Superfoods grubs and fruit: 30 percent insects and 50 percent fruit, so I hoped it would taste like fruit. It didn't. Still bad.
• Banana Cream Pie: I was sure this would be delicious. It doesn't smell as good as I hoped, and it isn't very good, but compared with the other diets it is up there with the best.

Gecko Pro

• New Caledonia flavour: very thick and smooth. Definitely a lot of banana in it. Not bad at all.
• A second Gecko Pro with no smell: again not bad.
• Pear flavour: smooth, almost like overcooked instant oatmeal.

The Gecko Pros were the best-tasting group overall.

Black Panther Zoological

Their selling point is that the protein is 100 percent insect, and I believe they use black soldier fly larvae.

• The first one I tried: not good at all.
• Color Bomb, strawberry banana: much better than the first, but still pretty gross.
• Melanistic: just bad. Not melon or fruit flavoured, just grainy and insecty.

These surprise me, because they get a good feeding response from geckos. If the geckos eat them, that is what matters.

Zoo Med juvenile formula

The ingredients start with potato protein, stabilised rice bran and insect meal. It smells like that, and eating it is like eating sand. It tastes like dirt. I'm not surprised I could never get any geckos to eat it.

Pangea

• Fruit Mix treat: surprisingly little flavour.
• Complete with insects: you can definitely tell it has insects in it.
• Breeding formula: I skipped it. It has insect meal, and by then I had learned my lesson about black soldier fly larvae.
• Watermelon Mango: I have fed this one for many years, so I already knew it was good. The smell alone reminds me of long days feeding geckos. Really not bad.

Results

My favorite was Pangea Watermelon Mango, with Repashy Banana Cream Pie close behind. All the Gecko Pros tasted pretty good, and anything with insects in it was bad.

If you are curious whether your gecko will like a food, try a tiny taste. If you like it, your gecko probably will. If you don't, your gecko probably still will, because geckos eat bugs on purpose.