Our position
Heat changes food. The dog-specific evidence is incomplete, but it has a direction. Raw fitted the recipe we wanted to make, and the evidence pointed the same way. Then we built the verification around it.
We wanted one complete recipe, with ingredients chosen for what each one contributes.
Calcium is a good example.
Dogs need calcium and phosphorus in the right balance. Muscle meat contains plenty of phosphorus, but relatively little calcium. Much of an animal's calcium is in its bones.
Protocol Raw Complete includes finely ground edible bone, providing calcium and phosphorus as part of the recipe itself.
A food made with boneless meat has to get that calcium another way. It can. There is nothing wrong with adding another source to make a food complete.
Where practical, we wanted the ingredients themselves to do that nutritional work. Raw suited the recipe we wanted to make.
See the ingredientsThis is established food science, and it applies to all food.
Cooking can make some foods easier to digest. It is also an effective way to reduce harmful bacteria.
Heat changes protein structure and can reduce some heat-sensitive nutrients.
We wanted to keep the food as close as practical to its original state.
If we could control the safety risk another way, we saw no reason to add a cooking step to a recipe that did not otherwise need one.
Then we looked at the evidence in dogs.
The evidence
Controlled feeding studies have compared raw, lightly cooked food and kibble.
Eight adult dogs were fed diets including raw, lightly cooked food and kibble.
The raw and lightly cooked diets were more digestible than the kibble diets, with measurable differences in the dogs' gut microbial profiles.
The difference between raw and lightly cooked was smaller than the difference between either of them and kibble.
Ten beagles were fed frozen raw, freeze-dried raw, fresh lightly cooked food and kibble.
In this trial, the kibble had the lowest digestibility values overall. The raw formats generally had the highest.
The fresh cooked food was significantly lower than raw formats on several digestibility measures.
The evidence for raw over lightly cooked is more limited than the evidence for either over kibble. But it is not absent. Where the controlled evidence separates them, the direction tends to favour raw.
Read the full evidence reviewHeat changes food.
Controlled feeding studies show raw and lightly cooked foods behaving differently from kibble.
Where the controlled evidence separates raw from lightly cooked, the direction tends to favour raw.
No long-term randomised controlled trial has established which feeding format produces the best lifetime health outcomes.
We cannot say raw has been shown to prevent a particular disease.
We cannot say it has been shown to extend lifespan.
And we cannot put a reliable number on any lifetime advantage.
The same limit applies to raw, lightly cooked food and kibble.
The evidence is incomplete. It is not neutral. We think it gives us enough reason to prefer raw, not enough to claim that every question has been settled.
There was enough for us to decide how we wanted to make the food.
This is where we landed.
We designed the recipe first. Then we chose the format that fitted it best.
We wanted the ingredients doing the nutritional work where practical, and to avoid heat where we did not think it was needed. The dog-specific evidence strengthened that decision.
Verification
Choosing raw means giving up cooking as a way to reduce harmful bacteria. That risk has to be controlled another way.
Every batch is held while its independent test results come back. It ships only once it meets our release criteria, including testing for Salmonella and Enterobacteriaceae.
The result for that batch is published for you to read.
How verification worksLondon first. Then everywhere. Be first to know when we're ready.
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