Orijen's Freeze-Dried Raw Dog Food: Our Review for Chewy.Com

Our good friends at Chewy.com were kind enough to send us a bag of Orijen's latest dog food, a 6 oz bag of biologically appropriate, freeze-dried medallions for our enjoyment and honest review. We chose the Tundra "flavor"-see our bag below. The opinions that follow are 100% our own!

As we've said before when reviewing high quality pet food and treats, when we use the word "flavor" we don't mean it the same way that some of the lower quality pet food brands do when they use it. Most lower quality brand pet foods use the word "flavor" or "flavored" to mean an artificial additive that's made in a laboratory to taste something like real beef, for example. With Orijen's food and treats, it's always 100% of the real thing. Keep in mind that this is raw food that is freeze-dried for the convenience of you Parental Units. Take a gander at the super-high quality ingredients in our Tundra "flavor" bag of food:

Venison (ground with bone)*, duck (ground with bone) *, Steelhead trout*, bison (ground with bone) *, elk (ground with bone) *, quail (ground with bone) *, duck liver*, duck heart*, spinach, pea fiber, bison tripe*, elk liver*, elk heart*, elk kidney*, ground sunflower seeds, Red Delicious apples*, Bartlett pears*, Red Heart plums*, Tilton apricots*, whole pumpkin*, Butternut squash*, Imperator carrots*, kelp*, mixed tocopherols, cranberries*, blueberries*, blackberries*, chicory root*, dandelion root*, summer savory, peppermint leaf*, ginger root*, iron proteinate, zinc proteinate, manganese proteinate. * DELIVERED FRESH, preservative-free and never frozen

                  Here's one medallion broken into my bowl.

Although Orijen's makes freeze-dried treats that don't need to be re-hydrated, they recommend that you add water to this food: 1/4 cup of warm water for each medallion, and let the food soak up the water for 3-5 minutes.

               Here's how it looks with 1/4 cup of warm water added.

We tried this several different times and obviously used up all of the medallions, but the food didn't seem to absorb the water for us-even though we let it sit for 10 minutes or more.

After the required re-hydrating time, we added some of my Orijen kibble to complete my dinner.

       Here I am scarfing down my biologically appropriate food!

     A close-up of me enjoying my dinner and licking the sides of the bowl.

         
                                  Bowl licked clean!

                    Not even a little nibble left for me?

The amazingly high quality of the ingredients in this food, combined with its relative ease of use (it takes very little effort to pour a bit of warm water of the medallions and let them sit for a few minutes while you humans attend to other things) makes them either a great food in itself or a topper for kibble. And most importantly, I loved it! So both Parental Unit and I give Orijen's new freeze-dried raw food for dogs a two thumbs and four paws up!

We wanted to mention one problem that Parental Unit found annoying about the packaging: the print was way too small for her to read, even with her "multi-focal" contacts plus reading glasses-whoops! Either she is ancient, or the print should be upped a few sizes:-)

If you haven't checked out Champion Pet Foods (the Canadian company who makes Orijen and Arcana pet foods) we highly recommend reading their wonderfully informative website and watching the video about their locally sourced ingredients and food processing plant.

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