You feed your dog well. You read the label when you chose their current food, you pay more than the supermarket shelf charges, and your dog is doing fine on it. Now you have started looking at raw, and the first voices you have met are the ones telling you that everything you are doing is wrong.
Ignore them. The useful question is calmer than that, and it has two parts. Why would you choose raw over a perfectly good kibble in the first place? And if you do, how do you tell good raw from a label that simply says the right things? This piece takes both, in that order.
Why choose raw over kibble
Raw is food that still looks like food. Meat, organ, and bone you would recognise on sight, kept fresh and whole, fed close to the state it came in. Kibble does not keep that form. The meat is usually dried and ground into a meal, blended with starch to hold the pellet together, cooked at high temperature, and pressed into a uniform dry shape that keeps for a year. Both can feed a dog. But they are not the same thing, and most people who move toward raw do so because the difference is obvious the moment you open the pack.
That instinct has substance behind it, and it starts with what the heat does. Cooking at the temperatures kibble is made at breaks down some of the nutrients in its ingredients, the heat-sensitive vitamins especially. Raw is not cooked, so its nutrients are not broken down that way. It reaches the bowl less altered than a food that has been through that process.
The research points the same way. The controlled studies that have compared formats in dogs find that less processing tends to mean better digestibility and measurable differences in the gut microbiome. The long-term trial that would prove it beyond argument has not been run, so we will not pretend it has, but the direction of the evidence is consistent, and it favours the food that is closer to whole. We lay it out in full, including what has and has not been shown, in Raw vs Cooked Dog Food.
There are plainer differences too. Raw food is mostly water, somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters of its weight, where dry food is usually around a tenth or less, so a kibble-fed dog takes on most of its water at the bowl rather than in its meals. And raw does not need the starch base that holds a kibble together, so it carries much less of the carbohydrate that dry food is built around.
None of this is a case against kibble. Good kibble is convenient, it keeps in a cupboard, it is easy to portion, and it is usually cheaper. Those are honest reasons people choose it, and a careful owner is allowed to weigh them. But if you have started looking at raw, you already know why: you want to put real, recognisable food in front of your dog, and the evidence gives that instinct a serious basis.
The catch, and it is a real one
Here is where a lot of pro-raw writing goes quiet, and where we will not. None of that counts for anything if you cannot confirm the food is actually complete and safe.
Complete means the recipe provides every nutrient a dog needs, in the right amounts and the right ratios. A raw diet that does not is not a better food than good kibble. It is a worse one. Least-processed and whole counts for very little if the recipe is short on something your dog needs every day for years.
Safety is a harder question for raw, and for a straightforward reason. Raw is not cooked, so there is no heat step in the factory to kill bacteria. When the Food Standards Agency surveyed raw dog and cat food on sale in the UK, a striking share of products were found to carry harmful bacteria such as Salmonella. That is a serious finding, and we do not wave it away. We have written about it in full elsewhere. Those failures are not the price of feeding raw. They are what happens when raw is made and sold without its safety being controlled and checked. With no heat step at the end, the risk has to be managed at the source and confirmed before the food ships, rather than assumed afterwards.
So the case for raw holds only when both of those things are true of the food in front of you. Not whether raw is better in principle, but whether the raw you are choosing is complete, whether it is safe, and whether you can tell.
Claimed, or shown
And that is harder than it sounds, because complete and safe are usually claims you cannot see behind. You cannot run a laboratory test on the bag, or the tray, in your hand. With kibble you are trusting the bag, and the bag is not infallible either. With most raw you are trusting the brand. The word on the front is a claim in both cases, not the evidence for it, and two foods can carry the same claim and be worlds apart behind it.
This is where Protocol Raw is built differently, and the difference is worth setting out, because completeness and safety are established in different ways.
A complete food starts with a complete recipe. Ours is built from whole-food ingredients chosen for what each one brings, and formulated around what a dog needs at every life stage. How a recipe gets there is a separate question, and not a moral one. Plenty of good foods use added vitamins and minerals where they are needed, and there is nothing wrong with that; we chose to get there through the ingredients themselves. The label should make that difference clear.
Safety is shown batch by batch, because it can only be shown that way. Analysing the recipe tells you the formulation is sound, but it cannot tell you that the particular tray in your freezer is clear of harmful bacteria, because contamination can occur in a single batch whatever the recipe says. Only testing that batch can. So every batch we make is tested by an independent UKAS-accredited laboratory for Salmonella and a hygiene indicator, and held back until the results are in. If a batch does not pass, it does not ship. The result for the exact batch you receive is published for you to read.
Testing every batch and publishing the result is unusual, and it is not free, which is most of why so few do it. It is also the only way to answer the question for the food you are actually holding rather than for the brand in general.
Choosing well
So, raw or kibble? A good kibble that is genuinely complete and safe will keep a dog well, and plenty do. But keeping a dog well is the floor, not the ceiling. The question worth asking is whether there is a better way to feed the dog in front of you, and on the evidence there is: the least processed, most recognisable food, fed whole. The catch we have been honest about is that raw only delivers on that when it is genuinely complete and its safety has been tested rather than assumed, and most raw asks you to take both on trust. The raw worth choosing is the one that shows you instead.
If you are weighing a switch, the place to start is the right portion for your dog, which comes from their daily energy needs rather than a fixed share of their bodyweight. Our feeding calculator works it out from their details.