About Raw Performance

Where we came from

Raw Performance started in 2012, and it started the way a lot of good things do — out of frustration.

Grant and Scott had already switched their own dogs to raw and seen what it did for them. But sourcing it was a mess. The products they could buy were inconsistent from batch to batch, over-processed, poorly mixed, and in some cases barely recognisable as real food. If you're going to feed your dog fresh meat, you should be able to look at it and see fresh meat.

So they started making it themselves, properly, with their family — and Raw Performance grew out of that. It's still a family business, and it's still run by people who feed this food to their own dogs.

Where it's made

Everything is made in-house at our own facility in Niagara, Ontario. We're not a brand that designs a recipe and hands it to someone else to produce — the food you're selling is mixed and packed by us.

We also run our own retail store at 22 Secord Dr., St. Catharines, which means we deal directly with dog owners every week. The questions your customers ask are the same ones we hear at our own counter.

Where the food comes from

Our proteins come from local farms across Ontario. The one exception is our salmon, which is wild-caught from British Columbia — because that's where the good salmon is.

The meat and vegetables are human-grade, and hormone and antibiotic free. No fillers. No preservatives.

That phrase "human grade" is worth pausing on, because it's the part customers most often misunderstand. It means the meat came into our facility fit for human consumption — the same supply chain standard as the meat in the butcher's case, not the "animal by-product" stream that a lot of pet food draws from. Our own staff buy meat for themselves from the same suppliers.

There is one deliberate exception, and you should know it: green beef tripe. "Green" means unbleached — and bleaching is exactly what would be required for human consumption. Bleaching also strips out the enzymes, probiotics and nutrients that make tripe worth feeding. So the tripe is cleaned but not bleached, which means it isn't technically human grade, and that's on purpose.

If a customer asks whether everything is human grade, that's the honest answer: everything except the green tripe, and there's a good reason for it.

On the floor

When someone asks who makes it, the short version is: "It's a family business out of Niagara — they started in 2012 because they couldn't buy raw food they trusted for their own dogs. Ontario farms, human-grade meat, no fillers. They've got their own store in St. Catharines."

That answer works because it's specific. "It's a good Canadian brand" tells a customer nothing.