Collection: Raw Dog Food

Raw feeding appeals to owners who want a short, legible ingredient list and minimal processing. We stock frozen raw - patties, nuggets and medallions kept in the freezer - and freeze-dried raw, which keeps the same ingredient profile without the freezer space or the thawing schedule.

Freeze-dried is where most people start. It's shelf-stable, rehydrates in a few minutes with warm water, travels well, and works equally as a full meal or a topper over kibble. Frozen raw is closer to a true raw diet and cheaper per calorie, but it demands freezer capacity and planning.

Raw food also demands attentive handling. It can carry Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli, and the risk extends to the people in your household as much as to your dog. The handling section below isn't boilerplate - please read it before you start, and talk to your veterinarian first if your dog has an existing health condition or if anyone in your home is immunocompromised.

Frozen, freeze-dried or air-dried?

Frozen raw is the closest thing to a true raw diet and the most economical of the three. The constraints are real though: freezer space for a large dog is substantial, and patties need to thaw in the refrigerator overnight rather than on the counter, which means planning a day ahead every day.

Freeze-dried raw has had its moisture removed under vacuum at low temperature, leaving the ingredients largely intact. It weighs a fraction as much, stores in a cupboard, and rehydrates quickly. It costs considerably more per calorie, which is why many households use it as a topper or for travel and feed frozen at home.

Air-dried food is dried slowly with warm air rather than frozen. It sits somewhere between raw and cooked, is shelf-stable, and is typically fed without rehydrating.

Browse our full freeze-dried range.

Safe handling: the part that matters

Commercial raw pet food has been repeatedly found to carry Salmonella and Listeria. Dogs fed raw can also shed these organisms in their faeces without showing any symptoms themselves, which is how household transmission usually happens. Handle raw pet food exactly as you would raw meat for human consumption.

Thawing

• Thaw in the refrigerator, never on the counter or in warm water

• Allow 12–24 hours for a day's portion

• Never refreeze food that has fully thawed

Preparation

• Use a dedicated cutting board, bowl and utensils that don't touch human food

• Wash your hands with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds afterwards

• Clean all surfaces, the sink and any tools with hot soapy water immediately

• Wash your dog's bowl after every meal, not at the end of the day

Feeding

• Don't leave raw food down for more than about 20 minutes

• Discard anything uneaten rather than refrigerating it and re-serving

• Feed in an easily cleaned area, not on carpet

Household

• Keep raw food and recently fed dogs away from anyone immunocompromised, infants, elderly or pregnant household members

• Wash your hands after handling your dog's faeces, and pick up promptly in the garden

• Be aware that dogs fed raw may shed bacteria in their stool even when perfectly healthy

Storage

• Keep frozen raw at 0°F or below

• Thawed food keeps 2–3 days in the refrigerator; check the manufacturer's guidance

• Store raw food on the bottom shelf of the fridge, sealed, so nothing can drip onto other items

High pressure processing (HPP)

Some manufacturers apply high pressure processing - a cold pasteurisation step that uses intense pressure rather than heat to reduce pathogen load. It's applied after packaging and doesn't cook the food, so the raw ingredient profile is largely retained.

If pathogen risk is your main hesitation, HPP is worth looking for. It reduces bacterial load significantly, though it doesn't eliminate the need for careful handling. Manufacturers who use it generally state it prominently on the packaging, since it's a selling point.

Note that a minority of raw feeders deliberately avoid HPP on the grounds that any processing step is undesirable. That's a preference rather than a safety argument.

Where veterinary opinion sits

Worth knowing before you commit, and you'll encounter it if you discuss raw feeding with your vet.

Major veterinary organisations, including the American Veterinary Medical Association, have adopted positions discouraging the feeding of raw or undercooked animal-source protein to pets, citing the pathogen risk to animals and to the humans in the household. The FDA has issued similar guidance. Their concern is specifically about contamination and transmission, not about the nutritional adequacy of a well-formulated raw diet.

Many owners feed raw for years without incident, using disciplined handling. Others decide the household risk isn't worth it. Both are reasonable conclusions from the same information.

What isn't reasonable is starting without knowing the position exists. If your dog is immunocompromised, on immunosuppressive medication, recovering from illness, or if anyone in your home falls into a higher-risk group, discuss it with your veterinarian before switching.

Is raw food complete and balanced?

Some products are. Many aren't, and the distinction is easy to miss.

Look for an AAFCO statement on the packaging confirming the food is complete and balanced for a named life stage. Products sold as toppers, mixers, boosters or treats are not intended as sole diets, and feeding one exclusively will produce nutritional gaps over time.

This matters more with raw than with other formats, because a lot of the category is sold as enhancement rather than as a full meal. Check before you assume.

Home-prepared raw diets are a separate concern. Analyses of recipes circulating online consistently find nutritional imbalances - commonly in calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D and trace minerals. If you want to prepare food yourself rather than buy commercial, work with a board-certified veterinary nutritionist to formulate it. Guessing at ratios causes real deficiencies, and the effects show up slowly.

On bones: commercial raw foods usually include finely ground bone as the calcium source, which is safe. Whole raw bones are a different product with different risks - fractured teeth and obstruction being the main ones. Cooked bones should never be given to dogs under any circumstances, as they splinter.

How much raw food to feed

Raw feeding is usually portioned by body weight rather than by calories. The standard starting point is 2–3% of adult body weight per day, split across two meals.

Use the lower end (2%) for sedentary, senior or overweight dogs and the upper end (3%) for active or working dogs. Puppies need considerably more - often 5–8% of current body weight, decreasing as they grow - and should be on a formula specifically labelled for growth.

For freeze-dried, follow the manufacturer's feeding guide rather than this table. The dried weight is roughly a quarter of the raw equivalent, so the numbers look very different on the bag.

As with any diet, adjust based on body condition. You should feel the ribs easily under a thin layer of fat and see a waist from above.

What raw feeding costs

Raw is the most expensive way to feed a dog, and the gap widens sharply with size.

A 44 lb dog eating around 1 lb 2 oz of frozen raw daily, at typical frozen raw pricing, will cost several times what the same dog costs on kibble - where daily feeding runs roughly $1.10 to $1.30. Freeze-dried costs more again per calorie, though it's often used in smaller quantities as a topper.

This is why a large proportion of people who are interested in raw end up feeding it partially: a kibble or wet base with freeze-dried raw as a topper, or raw for one meal a day and kibble for the other. You get some of what attracted you to raw at a cost that works over years rather than weeks.

Browse meal toppers if that's the route you'd rather take.

Transitioning to raw

Go slower than you would between two kibbles. Two to three weeks is typical, and some dogs need longer.

Start by replacing about a quarter of the current food with raw for three to four days, then move to half for another three to four days, then three quarters, then complete. Watch stool consistency as your guide - if it loosens, hold at the current ratio for a few extra days rather than pushing forward.

Some owners prefer to feed raw and kibble as separate meals rather than mixing them in the same bowl. The theory is that they digest at different rates; the evidence for that specific concern is limited, but separating meals does make it easier to identify which food is causing a problem if one arises.

Introduce one protein at a time. Starting with a single novel protein and adding others over several weeks makes it far easier to identify a sensitivity if your dog reacts.

Expect some changes: raw-fed dogs typically produce smaller, firmer, less frequent stools. Persistent diarrhoea, vomiting or lethargy is not part of the adjustment and warrants stopping and calling your vet.

Shop raw and freeze-dried

Don't see the brand you feed? Contact us and we'll look into stocking it.

Auto-ship

Raw and freeze-dried are exactly the kind of thing worth having arrive automatically, particularly frozen raw where running out means either an abrupt diet change or an unplanned trip. Choose delivery every 2 weeks, monthly, every 3 months or every 6 months, save 5% on every order, and change, skip or cancel any time.

For frozen raw, check your freezer capacity before choosing an interval - a month's supply for a large dog takes real space.