Why is Raw Pet Food So Expensive

We get it. When we first started raw feeding our dog in 2018, we ordered our ingredients online, DIY’d her meals, and our costs were around $2-3/lb. We couldn’t fathom how companies were charging double or triple that price.

Before we get into it, we know everyone reading this wants the best for their pet, but fresh food is undeniably expensive. We firmly believe that we have the most affordable prices for the quality of food we’re making, but still, we know our prices aren’t going to work for everyone. Regardless of whether you use our food or decide on another, we just want to make sure that after you read this post, you know what to look out for, what questions to ask, and make the best choice for your pet when you’re comparing options. 

Back when we DIY’d, we bought some ground turkey for cheap, fed it to our dog and her poop came out as white chalky crumbles. Turns out, we had bought mechanically separated turkey. Mechanically separated meat (MSM) is made by using high pressure to squeeze small bits of edible tissue from bone after the choice cuts are removed. MSM is higher in fat and calcium compared to muscle cuts, and the extra calcium is what gave our pup chalky stools.

AAFCO publishes a set of nutritional requirements that all “Complete & Balanced” foods need to meet. Although regulators can test your food to see if it meets requirements, in reality, that rarely happens since their main focus is product safety (are there pathogens in your food?) and facility sanitation. There’s very little oversight over whether or not a food contains the nutrients it claims and it is up to each company to determine how much they want to invest in testing and formulation. The level of investment can range from the following:

The most common ratio diets are “Prey Model Raw” that recommends 80% meat, 10% bone, 10% organ or “Biologically Appropriate Raw Food” which has 70% meat, 10% bone, 10% organ, and 10% fruits & veggies. Ratio diets refer to any framework that says to use X% of this type of ingredient and Y% of another ingredient to achieve a balanced meal.

The main issue is that these categories are so broad that the ingredients within them can’t substitute for one another nutritionally. For example, beef liver and chicken liver have very different copper levels (14.4 mg/100 g vs. 0.57 mg/100 g), but a ratio diet that says to use 5% liver doesn't distinguish between the two. Ratio diets are also commonly deficient in several key nutrients that are detailed in this article. 

The notion that you can rely on ratios to balance a recipe is very popular in the raw feeding community since it makes it easy to get started. In most cases, we see smaller, local brands marketing ratio-based foods as “Complete & Balanced”, and that is likely due to the misconception that ratio diets are balanced and a lack of awareness that you need to formulate to nutrient and not ingredient levels.  

Once companies realize the importance of meeting nutrient, not ingredient, requirements, they’ll need to start using some type of calculator that pulls from a database of nutrient profiles. You adjust the ingredients and amounts you’re using and the calculator will provide the expected nutrient content of the recipe and see if it meets AAFCO standards.

The main issue is that the nutrient profile of your ingredients is likely different from the public databases that these softwares will pull from. Any whole food ingredient such as meat, seeds, fruits & veggies will have variations in nutrient content depending on how it was grown or raised. Not to mention that most publicly available data is older and comes from small sample sizes. As a result, you can have a Complete & Balanced recipe on paper but not in reality since the formulation softwares are only as accurate as the data it contains. 

This is where you can start to spend a lot. The fundamental challenge is that the nutrient content of ingredients varies. As an example, most sources state that blue-lipped mussels are high in manganese at 3.4 mg/100 g, but our testing came in 6x lower at 0.58 mg/100g. The only way you can truly ensure you’re making a balanced recipe is through regular lab testing of both raw materials and your finished product, which is costly, time-consuming, and requires special expertise.

Using whole food ingredients also adds to the complexity since they will always have more variability compared to synthetic vitamins & minerals with known concentrations. If a certain batch of raw materials comes in with a different nutrient profile from the past, you may end up having to reformulate which is another costly endeavor.

A robust program doesn’t mean you’re testing everything all the time but you’ve done enough surveillance testing to trust your data, know which nutrients have more variability, which ones have a higher risk of being above or below targets, and develop a testing schedule accordingly.

One of the most common concerns from veterinarians is that raw diets are not properly balanced, and there is validity to this since raw food manufacturers span a large spectrum in terms of their nutritional knowledge. We’ve invested heavily in this area with regular testing since we believe in the importance of formulating a properly balanced diet. 

Premium proteins like duck, rabbit, lamb, venison, etc., naturally command a higher price. However, some companies will label their recipe as a novel proteins but mix it with lower-cost ingredients like chicken, turkey, or beef. Even if the premium protein is listed first, it doesn’t guarantee that it’s the majority of the recipe.

Labeling regulations only require that the ingredients list be ordered by weight, so if your recipe was 40% venison, 30% beef hearts, and 30% beef liver, your ingredients list would be “venison, beef heart, beef liver”. Most people who see this would think that venison was over 50% of the recipe, but the reality is that beef is the real majority at 60%.

All of our recipes are single-protein since this is very important for pets with sensitivities that may need to avoid certain ingredients. Plus we want you guys to get what you paid for! If you're looking at the ingredients list and the recipe isn’t single protein, ask the company what percentage of the recipe the first ingredient actually makes up. 

The FDA has a zero-tolerance policy for all pet foods. This is orders of magnitude more difficult for raw foods since all raw meat contains a low level of pathogens, BUT they must be eliminated without heat or any harsh treatments. This is a scientifically challenging and costly task and companies can easily lower costs by not investing in robust measures.

There are three main categories a company can spend on:

1. Testing technologies & running validation studies: Food safety technologies are not one-size-fits-all all and their effectiveness can vary depending on your product and processes. That’s why it’s important for companies to run validation studies with labs on their own product to ensure they work. We’ve conducted studies on multiple technologies such as HPP, bacteriophages, and acid washes to find the best fit for our process, and we are constantly evaluating new technologies and hurdles to improve our processes.
   
   

2. Cost of the technology itself: Any intervention a company decides to use will add to production costs, and the more robust approaches tend to be more expensive.
   
   

3. Ongoing raw material & finished product testing: The first question to ask is if a brand tests their products for pathogens and holds them until negative results return. This is a minimum requirement, but the real question is if they’re sampling enough to avoid false negatives. Pathogens are sparsely distributed in the food, so if you’re only taking a small number of samples per batch, odds are you’ll receive negative results based on chance alone.
   
   We sample every few minutes throughout production so that we can have confidence in our test results. Not only are we testing our finished product, but we also test each batch of our raw materials for indicator microorganisms so we can understand how clean our ingredients are and objectively evaluate our supplier quality.
   
   

The cost of lab testing, working with scientists, and implementing various food safety technologies are a big factor in a product’s price. Companies can easily save by not implementing effective food safety interventions and performing only a minimal amount of testing, but we believe that this is an important aspect of our food’s quality. Ask companies what food safety interventions they use, if they've run validation studies on those interventions, and how frequently they're collecting samples for testing during production. 

Our facility spends just as much time cleaning as it does making food. Every piece of equipment is fully disassembled, the walls are scrubbed, the drains are foamed, the list goes on. The difference between a decent facility and a great facility is not just the cleaning, but all aspects of its operations. Freezer and refrigerator temperatures are constantly monitored, raw materials are kept separate from finished products, every batch of supplements is weighed and logged and so on.

Following Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and having a HACCP plan is the legal minimum. Look for facilities that also undergo 3rd party audits like BRC or SQF . The additional people, processes, and documentation required will inevitably cost more but it all affects the final quality. 

A main reason that there are so many low-cost raw food options is because raw pet food began on the fringes. Many were prepping homemade meals, and local butcher shops and meat processors were looking for a way to sell their less valuable organ meat and trim. The irony is that raw pet food is the easiest to get started with (all you need is a grinder and a mixer), but it is the hardest to make well. The ease of entry is why companies are started by people with such varying levels of experience, and in turn, that’s reflected in the huge range of standards we see in this category.

It’s difficult to tell if a raw pet food is high quality since so many of the aspects above are things we can’t see, touch, or feel. Most things we buy, like food or clothing, we can tell it’s quality and we know we’re getting what we paid for. The only way most people can determine the quality of a food is by looking at how it affects their pet’s health, but it may be too late at that point.

We’ve only learned about these aspects by immersing ourselves in the industry for years, and it would be nearly impossible for the average pet owner to figure this out on their own. We wanted to share our knowledge because we’re pet parents first, business owners second, and this is exactly the information we would want to make the best choice for our pets. 

Image: Chubs of raw pet food being sold at a local market. It’s an affordable price but it doesn’t come with any labels, ingredients, or nutritional information.

If you're not sure where to start, use our feeding calculator for personalized feeding recommendations and recipe suggestions.