With a Golden Retriever, the harder question is often not whether raw food suits the breed. It is how much to give.
The recipe is the straightforward half. A Golden needs the same complete diet as any other dog. What changes with the breed is the number, and a Golden makes it easy to get wrong without noticing.
Why the amount is the hard part with this breed
Two things work against a Golden Retriever's owner, and neither is about the food.
The first is the coat. A Golden carries a dense double coat with feathering over the chest, flank and hindquarters. Every body condition guide tells you to look for a waist from above and a tuck from the side. On a Golden, those are precisely the places the coat sits thickest. You are being asked to look at something the dog is wearing a coat over.
The second is the training. Goldens are biddable and food-motivated, which is a large part of why they are such rewarding dogs to train. It also means they get trained with food, and rewarded with food, and included at the edges of meals. A handful of training treats on a Thursday evening is not a rounding error by the end of the week.
Neither of these makes a Golden difficult to feed. They make a Golden difficult to assess, which is a different problem with a much simpler answer.
Use your hands, once a month
The check takes about thirty seconds and you only need to do it monthly.
Run both hands flat along your dog's ribcage with light pressure, the pressure you would use to feel the knuckles on the back of your own hand. You should be able to feel each rib without pressing for it. Then look at the dog from the side, and from above with the coat smoothed down flat rather than fluffed out. You are looking for a visible tuck behind the ribcage and a narrowing behind them from above.
A single check tells you where your dog is today. Doing it monthly tells you the direction, and the direction is what is invisible from one week to the next.
What this means for you: On a Golden, your hands will tell you what your eyes miss. The coat makes a change in condition easy to overlook.
How much a Golden should eat
Portions here are calorie-led. We start from how much energy your dog needs in a day, then convert that into food. That is a different method from the percentage-of-body-weight rules common in raw feeding. Two Goldens of the same weight can need materially different amounts, and a percentage rule cannot tell them apart.
Body weight sets the base, but energy need scales with metabolic weight rather than linear weight, so a heavier dog does not need proportionally more food. On top of that sit life stage, activity level, neuter status and current body condition. Neuter status can materially change the answer, which is why the calculator asks rather than assumes. A guess and an answer look identical once they are on the screen.
Body condition changes the direction of the number as well as its size. For a dog assessed as carrying extra weight, the portion is set below what the dog currently needs, and never above it. That is not a tolerance or a rounding convention. It is the whole point: a dog being managed down is on a plan that feeding at maintenance defeats.
Treats come out of the total, not on top of it
The calorie figure is a statement about your dog: this is what your dog needs in a day, everything included. There is no treat allowance built into it.
That is because we have no way to set one honestly. Treat habits run from almost nothing to a meaningful share of the day depending on the household, and a number built on an assumed average would be wrong for nearly everyone while looking exactly like an answer. So the figure assumes food only, and the arithmetic on top of it is yours. If you train with food, and with a Golden you probably do, those calories come out of the day's total and the meal comes down accordingly.
It also makes treats the first place to look if the weight starts moving the wrong way. Count what else went in before you change the portion.
That is less convenient than a number that pretends treats do not exist. If your dog's weight is already moving the wrong way, the fuller method is in Managing Your Dog's Weight on Raw Food.
Golden Retriever puppies
Goldens are a large breed, and large-breed puppies are the one case where more food is not better. Steady growth is the aim. Pushing a large-breed puppy to grow faster than it otherwise would is not a kindness to it, and the correction is simply an accurate portion, recalculated as the dog grows.
Every puppy is given a daily amount to weigh out rather than a tray combination, and that amount is recalculated monthly. A growing dog's requirement changes continuously, so a figure set in March may already be out of date by May. The calculator also does not ask a puppy's body condition, because growth is not something to be restricted by it.
For the detail on feeding a puppy raw, see Raw Feeding for Puppies: Safety and Completeness. For why one recipe covers a puppy and an eleven-year-old dog, see One Recipe for Every Life Stage.
The recipe itself
Protocol Raw Complete is built from whole ingredients rather than assembled to hit a set of numbers. Muscle meat, organ and bone are the base, and the base on its own is not complete. What closes the gap is the rest of it: liver, oyster, mussel, kelp and cod liver oil, each in the recipe for what it contributes rather than to clear a line. There are no synthetic additives, because the ingredients already carry what the food needs.
It is complete for every life stage: puppies, adults, seniors, and pregnant and nursing dogs. Completeness is a property of the recipe.
Safety is a separate assurance and works differently, because contamination is a batch-level event rather than a recipe-level one. Every batch is tested by an independent laboratory and held until the results are in. The results are published. You can see what a batch report looks like before you buy anything. View sample proof page.
Some diagnosed conditions need a specific therapeutic diet. Protocol Raw Complete is not one, and is not designed to replace one. If your vet has prescribed a diet, follow their plan.
Switching a Golden over
There is nothing breed-specific about moving a Golden Retriever onto raw. The ordinary approach applies, and it is set out in Switching from Kibble to Raw.
The short version: The recipe does not change for a Golden Retriever. The number does.
Work out what your Golden needs, and the rest stops being guesswork.