I feed Cichlid gold as well along with peas, earthworns, wax worms, cadis larvae, tadpoles, scuds, or what ever else is easy to catch. they seem to like it a lot. When they are young like 1-2 inches I mix all the extra foods that is laying around and feed that so switching foods later on isn't a hard task and also to get rid of excess food. I tried a fast growth trout pellet that my dad feeds his koi pond with once and that seemed to work great.