About 8 months ago, my husband and I made the switch to raw food for our pup. Prior to feeding her raw, we had her on Acana, a reputable dry kibble made with fresh local ingredients. The problem was that she continued to experience diarrhea and an upset stomach even on high-quality kibble. After 3 days on raw food, however, the pooch’s stomach was a-okay.

Pets Go Raw – love it!
There’s a lot of raw options out there; some of them expensive, others labourious. We chose to go with Pets Go Raw. The mix of raw meat with bone, fresh fruit and veggies, as well as vitamins and herbs like garlic and vitamin C made for a great full meal. Pets Go Raw food also came in a variety of meats like chicken, turkey, beef and fish. This let us mix it up every now and then. At about $10-$15 for about 10 ounces of raw food, it was a good price. The product was easy to prep and thaw too. It came in hockey puck patties that fit nicely in tupperware so we could prep a few days’ worth of food in about 5 minutes while keeping a few extra patties in the freezer.

The thing about raw food is that it can be a mess to prep and feed to your pup, so it’s important that you don’t have to touch the food at all. The Pets Go Raw packaging was perfect for this. There were little slips of paper between the meat patties which meant that you could slide the frozen patties out of the bag and into a tupperware container without touching it. And then when it came time for feeding the dog, you could just turn the tupperware upside down, drop the food in the bowl, then throw the empty container in the sink for a quick rinse and still not get any meat juice on your hands. Perfect!

We told friends about the product. Good price, great quality, easy to prep and feed. You’re happy, your dog is happy, it’s all good.

Pets Go Raw introduces new packaging
After 8 months of feeding our dog Pets Go Raw raw food and advocating the brand to friends for their furry family members, Pets Go Raw changed their packaging. The dog health food stores were pumping us up about the new package saying it comes in easy-to-squeeze tubes, full 1-ounce packages and new branding.

Here’s a picture that shows what the packaging looked like before (the packages on the bottom 2 shelves) and after (the top 2 shelves).

Pets Go Raw (new packaging) - hate it!
After 1 week of working with the new packaging, my husband noticed I was always asking him to do feed the dog. I no longer had the interest or desire to prep or feed our pooch. What I discovered was that I hated the new packaging so much that it actually ruined the bonding experience of feeding my dog.

The new packaging is sealed with two metal clamps at either end of a plastic tube. It looks a lot like a hot dog with metal clasps at the top and bottom. Here are just some of the problems with the new packaging:

• You can’t open it when it’s frozen. So you have to wait for the meat to thaw in the hot-dog tube and then slice the top open with a knife. This means that your hands get wet with raw meat juice when you are opening the package. Gross.
• It doesn’t re-seal well. We don’t feed our dog a full ounce at a time, so we would end up with these half-open tubes in our fridge. Even worse, the meat juice leaked down 2 shelves in our fridge into our vegetable crisper. So my husband ended up spending a Saturday afternoon scrubbing all the crevices of our fridge to get the meat juice out. Brutal.
• There’s more food wastage. You can’t get all of the food out of the tube because it sticks to the sides and openings. Raw food ain’t cheap, so getting every last bit into your dog’s bowl is important. With each portion we were throwing perfectly good morsels away. Bad.
• They aren’t stackable. With raw dog food, you always have to stock some in your fridge and your freezer. If they aren’t stackable, they take up too much room in both places. Annoying.

A “good” business decision with a bad customer experience result
You can see how the new packaging is cheaper for Pets Go Raw – lots of the other brands do it too. It must give them higher margins, which makes business sense. The problem is that the new packaging completely ruins the experience of feeding your dog. People who love dogs know how important feeding is to the bonding process. Pets Go Raw should have kitchen-tested their new packaging before rolling it out. They would have realized that it took all the love and pride out of feeding your dog the best food money can buy.

I spoke with my friend who was also a Pets Go Raw fan. She hates the new packaging too. I mentioned my disappointment in the new packaging at the dog health food store too; they said they’ve been hearing a lot of the same.

Switched to Urban Carnivore
Last time I went to re-stock my raw food supply, I switched to Urban Carnivore (I think they are changing their brand name to Carnivora). It’s a little more expensive, but the packaging is just like the old Pets Go Raw hockey-puck packaging. I am planning to contact Pets Go Raw about their new packaging, but in the meantime, I’m happily feeding my dog again and telling my friends to make the switch too.

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