First, I can not thank Mark Warrell at Optimal for him scraping up some BG starter feed for me. I callled Optimal directly and Mark answered the phone. I told him I recently stocked a new pond back in March and now when I feed my fish there are a ton of fry trying to eat the BG Junior and those pellets are too big for the fry. Optimal has been out of started feed for a while but he said he would look around and see if he could scrape up some for me. Got a phone call from Mark a few days later that he was able to put a few bags together and shipped them out the next day. Now some of you on here may have some stroke with some of these other brands, but someone like me who just started ordering their fish food this year thanks to so many of you on this forum talking about how much your fish loves Optimal fish food, that Optimal would answer the phone and listen to dilemma and then ship those bags to little ol' me. That is customer service at its greatest. Not trying to start a debate on the best fish food but just wanted to share my experience with Mark at Optimal for those of you are new to feeding and was just like me a few months ago reading post on here about which fish food to start using. So that is my 2 cents worth and hope I can benefit a newbie on here just like many others have done for me. Have a great weekend everyone and thanks again Mark.

Kevin, I've found the same. Glad to hear of your positive experience & best of luck with the fish!

Kevin - Thanks for the feedback for readers about Optimal fish food. Keep us periodically updated about how your fish are growing and your pond experiences. You should be able to grow some dandy bluegill in the Louisiana climate.

I’ve also talked to him.He has a genuine interest in quality control and customer service

taking another opportunity to put in a good word for Optimal. Fish go crazy for it and happy with the growth! Love the easy web page ordering process and rapid shipping (for free for my order).

I like to mix the Optimal JR and the Optimal Bluegill. Both bags do have a variety of sizes but the bluegill has fairly large pellet lengths and I prefer to mainly feed my smaller fish and minnows. I used a large sled to put 2 bags of larger size pellets with one bag of the junior size pellets and then rebag the mix into 3 bags.

I noticed the pellets have a different color, the larger pellets are darker (why is that?) You can see in the picture off in the bottom corner of the sled the darker colored pellets underneath and the lighter colored on top.

The fresh smell is amazing (and it is not so easy to wash the fishy smell off you hands which is a true mark of quality)!!

CC, are the different colored feeds a different feed? i.e. Optimal BG Jr one color, Optimal BG a different color?

If you want to feed the smaller sized fish, throw in a bag of Optimal Starter #4. It's an extruded floating pellet (at least the bags last year and this year have been 99.9% floating).

Yes, I can't remember which was which but pretty sure the darker is the larger Optimal BG with larger extruded sizes and the lighter is the Jr. sized pellets. I thought they were the same formula and just different size classes but it sounds like the formula might be different, or the 'cookers' were set to a little higher heat on one of the batches?

Bluegill is 40/10, Junior is 42/10