You’ve decided to feed your pet a species appropriate raw diet. Congratulations!
After spending time researching your options, you’ve now decided to choose a commercially prepared, balanced raw diet. Now comes the hard part.
How do you choose which brand to purchase?
As pet owners become more educated about nutrition for their pets, more are choosing to feed commercially prepared raw diets for the convenience, as well as for the peace of mind knowing that it is safe and balanced.
How do you decide which one is the best choice for your pets? There is an ever growing list of raw pet food brands available as popularity increases, and it can become quite confusing knowing how to make the best choice for your pet.
Always do your research first.
While friends and family can be helpful, we encourage you to go beyond friendly advice or just other pet owner recommendations. There are many questions that we ourselves ask every raw food manufacturer that we interview prior to choosing to carry their products. We ask these questions because you, our valued clients, are placing your trust in us to provide you with safe, balanced, quality nutrition for your pets.
We value your trust. We know how important your pet’s health, wellness and safety is. You trust that we’ve done the homework for you. You trust that the choices we’ve made for our store, for our own pets, and for our clients are based on our 15+ years of pet nutrition experience, 13+ years of raw feeding our own pets, and you also trust that if we choose to carry it, we’ve already asked these questions, and they have been answered to our satisfaction, before we allowed the product into our freezers.
For anyone who knows us, they know how selective we are, both for our own pet’s sake and for your pet’s sake. To us, Creature Comfort Pet Emporium is not “a business”, it is a service that we provide to pet owners because it is truly our passion. We take food very seriously as the foundation of your pet’s health and we will never compromise the quality that we offer you and your pets.
Food for thought…
Questions we suggest asking when choosing a raw brand.
Never be afraid to ask for proof.
- Do your products have a lot number or best before date? This is important in order to be able to trace lots in the event of any concerns or reported issues. MANY raw food producers do not provide this traceability or accountability.
- Are your raw ingredients sourced from CFIA/government inspected sources?
- Do you have a meat/bone/organ % ratio listed on your analysis for every formula?
- How often do you perform third party labratory analysis? (ask for full analysis details)
- What is your in house testing protocol for bacteria/contamination? *See ATP reference below
- How is your food handled from the arrival of all ingredients right through to the end of the manufacturing process? How is your food stored and transported after production is completed?
- What are your food safety and quality protocols for sourcing and manufacturing?
- What cuts of meat do you source and actually use in each formula?
- Where is your meat and formula ingredients sourced from? (Creature Comfort chooses to offer only Canadian raw pet food formulas. *HPP processing is done on USA brands to cross the border, which in our opinion destroys the benefits of the fresh food ingredients and denatures proteins.
“Our food is more affordable because we have improved our manufacturing processes, which makes the food less expensive to produce, therefore we can pass the better price onto the customer. We never use cheap meats or scraps/leftovers, only human grade high end meats, bones, organs and vegetables are used in our formulas. If we can’t eat it, it does not go in the food”” (Bold/Mega Dog Raw)
“Iron Will Raw understands that quality manufacturing and quality ingredients comes with a higher price, however the high standards of our raw food is not a subject of compromise.” “Quality ingredients come at a much higher cost than lower quality ingredients. While Iron Will Raw is often offered lower quality ingredients which would “cheapen” our recipes, we refuse to be tempted to compromise the quality of our foods.”
These are just a few of the questions that we advise all pet owners to ask before choosing a raw pet food brand. We confidently and proudly offer our clients Bold Raw, Iron Will Raw, Mega Dog Raw raw diets based on our rigid criteria for both quality and safety as well as traceability and accountability. We will not compromise our standards based on marketing or “cheaper” brands. Your trust is something we take seriously, and we believe that your pets are worth it.
We offer free consultations in-store for anyone who would like more information regarding the benefits of feeding a quality raw diet to your pets.
* ATP testing helps assess standards of hygiene and cleaning procedures by measuring the amount of adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP) in a sample. The systems indicate overall biological contamination including microbiological and product residues for a fuller picture of the hygiene status of equipment. ATP is present in all animal, vegetable, bacteria, yeast and mould cells and detection of ATP indicates the presence of contamination by any one of these sources.
*HPP processing in foods: Pascalization, bridgmanization, high pressure processing (HPP) or high hydrostatic pressure (HHP) processing is a method of preserving and sterilizing food, in which a product is processed under very high pressure, leading to the inactivation of certain microorganisms and enzymes in the food.