You want to do right by your dog, and somewhere in your reading you have probably met the idea that the best way to feed raw is to make it yourself. This article gives you a straight answer about what separates homemade raw from a complete, tested diet, so you can decide with your eyes open.
It helps to start by naming something most people are never told. When owners begin looking into raw feeding, a large share assume the two words mean one thing: that raw is something you prepare at home from meat, bone and offal, and that buying it ready-made is somehow the lesser, lazier option. That assumption quietly frames the whole decision before you have really made it, so it is worth reframing at the outset. The real choice in front of you is not raw against kibble. It is a complete, independently tested raw diet against a homemade diet that may be unbalanced and cannot be batch-verified in a home kitchen. Those are genuinely different things, and which side a diet lands on is not decided by where it was made.
The impulse to make it yourself is a good one
Let us be clear about this before anything else, because a lot of writing on the subject is not. Wanting to make your dog's food yourself is a reasonable, often admirable instinct. It usually comes from the right place: you want control over what goes in, you would rather use real ingredients than trust a label, and preparing food with your own hands feels more honest than buying it in a bag or a tray. Homemade also looks cheaper, and for a lot of households that matters a great deal. It can look simpler, too, at least at the start: a bit of meat, some offal, a little bone, and you are away.
None of that is naive, and none of it deserves the faint sneer it sometimes gets. The people who feed homemade raw are often the most careful owners in the room. The problem is not effort or intention. It is that two specific things are much harder to get right at home than they appear, and both fail quietly, which is the worst way for anything to fail.
The two real risks, named plainly
For most owners, two risks matter most, and both are worth stating without drama. The first is nutritional imbalance that builds up slowly over months. The second is pathogen exposure that a home kitchen has no way to check for. Almost everything else about DIY raw hangs off these two.
Why completeness is genuinely hard at home
A dog's diet has to hit dozens of nutrient targets. Not just protein and fat, but a long list of vitamins and trace minerals, each needed within a range, and several of them needed in the right ratio to one another. Calcium and phosphorus, for example, are judged not on how much of each is present but on their balance. Getting all of this right in a single home recipe, and then repeating it faithfully meal after meal, is far more demanding than it looks on a chopping board.
The evidence here is not ambiguous. When researchers at Texas A&M assessed 1,726 homemade diets supplied by owners, only around 6% had the potential to be nutritionally complete. An earlier and widely cited veterinary review examined 200 home recipes written for healthy dogs and found that 95% fell short of the recommended minimum on at least one essential nutrient, and 84% were short on several at once. A more recent analysis of homemade-style diets found selenium lacking in roughly nine out of ten of them, and copper and zinc lacking in nearly half. The particular nutrients change from study to study. The pattern does not.
The hardest part is that a plate of raw meat, bone and organ can look complete while being nothing of the sort. A popular rule of thumb, a fixed ratio of muscle meat to bone to offal, is a sensible starting point for structure, but it does not on its own guarantee the trace minerals and vitamins land where they need to. A diet built only from, say, chicken breast, chicken bone and chicken liver can be missing several essentials entirely. And because deficiency is slow, a dog eating an incomplete diet usually looks perfectly well for months before anything shows. By the time a dull coat or subtler problem appears, the shortfall has been running for a long time, which is what makes home formulation so easy to underestimate.
We are not going to re-argue what complete actually means here, because that is a subject of its own. If you want the full account of nutritional completeness and how it is defined, our article on whether raw food is nutritionally complete covers it properly. The point for this particular decision is narrower. Completeness is difficult to achieve at home, easy to get wrong, and easy to get wrong invisibly.
Testing is the real dividing line
The second risk is the one most homemade guides skip, and it is where an honest comparison gets more interesting than the usual scare story.
Raw meat carries a genuine risk of pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria and certain strains of E. coli. This is true wherever it comes from, including the meat already in your fridge. It is not a raw-feeding scandal. It is simply what raw animal protein is.
It is worth being accurate rather than alarmist, because accuracy is the entire point of how we work. Meat sold in UK supermarkets for people to eat has relatively low contamination rates, often a few per cent or less depending on the type. Commercial raw pet food, by contrast, has been found to carry pathogens noticeably more often. In the Food Standards Agency's 2023–24 survey of raw pet food on retail sale, around a fifth of samples tested positive for Salmonella, 35% contained harmful bacteria, and 29% failed to meet UK legal safety standards. That is a real consideration for any household, because the risk does not stop at the bowl.
Where a household includes a young child, someone over 65, or someone pregnant, follow the same hygiene you would when preparing raw chicken for the family. That is the standard, and it is worth being consistent about. Because Protocol Raw Complete is uncooked, it is not recommended where your dog, or someone in your household, is immunocompromised: during chemotherapy, on immunosuppressant medication, or after a transplant. If that applies to you, check with your vet or doctor first.
Here is the honest conclusion, and it is not the marketing one. The dividing line that matters is not raw against cooked, and it is not even homemade against shop-bought. It is tested against untested. Whatever the source, the one thing a home kitchen cannot do is check whether the specific batch in front of your dog carries the pathogens raw meat can carry. You can handle raw meat impeccably, keep everything cold, wash everything down, and separate it carefully from your own food, and still have no way of knowing whether this particular tray carries something you would rather it did not. Testing is the only thing that closes that gap, and a domestic kitchen cannot test the food it is about to serve.
This is where verification stops being a marketing line and becomes a standard every brand should be held to. That is a standard much of commercial raw misses too: a great deal of it is neither independently verified as complete nor batch-tested with results you can see, so "complete" on the label stays a promise rather than proof. It is also why every batch we make is tested before it ships, and why we publish the results rather than ask you to take our word for them. If you want to see what that looks like, a sample batch report shows what we test for and what a clear result looks like, and our guide to reading a batch safety report explains what each line means.
What a complete, tested raw diet gives you that homemade cannot
Set against all of that, the case for a complete, independently tested raw diet is straightforward, and it rests on what the food is rather than on any paperwork it clears.
The first thing it gives you is balance you can rely on. A complete raw diet is built from real meat, organs and bone and then formulated to meet everything a dog actually needs, rather than left to whatever a fixed ratio happens to provide. It is complete food for puppies, adults and seniors. The standard matters, but it is not the point; the point is that your dog's nutrition is complete, meal after meal, and we verify that against recognised nutritional guidelines rather than ask you to take the word "complete" on trust.
The second thing it gives you is safety you can check. Every batch is tested before it ships, and the results are published for you to see rather than filed away. This is the piece homemade cannot provide at any level of care, not because home cooks are careless but because the testing infrastructure to verify a batch does not exist in a domestic kitchen.
There is a third thing it removes, and any owner who has fed homemade recognises it. Homemade raw is a standing weekly job: sourcing several cuts and ingredients, mixing them in the right proportions, then weighing and portioning every meal. A complete diet portioned to your dog's own daily serving takes all of that off your hands, and it is rarer than it sounds: most ready-made raw comes in bulk packs you divide up yourself. Because we know the exact calorie content of every serving, each one arrives already measured to what your dog needs, with no estimating by eye or feeding by a percentage of body weight. That matters for more than convenience. Portioning by guesswork is how dogs are quietly over-fed or under-fed for months, and over-feeding is among the most common and most preventable problems a dog can have. The amount is worked out once, from your dog's energy needs, and the day's food is simply the tray.
A complete, tested raw diet is the better choice not because it meets a regulation, but because it is genuinely complete food and because you can see for yourself that each batch is safe. Most raw brands ask you to take both of those things on trust. The difference is that we show you.
If you do feed homemade, do it properly
None of this is meant to talk you out of caring what goes into your dog. If, having weighed it up, you still want to feed homemade, the responsible way is not to follow a recipe you found on a forum. It is to work with a qualified canine nutritionist who formulates a diet to your dog's requirements, then follow it exactly, treating no ingredient as optional. Understand that the pathogen risk is still there whatever you cook up, and handle raw meat accordingly. Take particular care if anyone in your home is very young, pregnant, elderly, or has a weakened immune system.
That is a real and defensible way to feed a dog. Done properly, with professional input, it is also more expensive than most people expect.
Working out the right amount
Whichever way you lean, the honest starting point is the same question: how much does your dog actually need? Our calculator works it out from your dog's energy requirement, adjusted for how active it really is, and gives you a straight answer whether you feed our food or someone else's.