Your Cart is Empty
Why this matters:there's almost certainly more than one raw brand in your freezer. When a customer asks "what's the difference?", you need an answer built on facts rather than enthusiasm. There's also a second difference that matters to your store, even if a customer never sees it.
Whole bone, not a calcium supplement. Covered in Lesson 2, and it's the difference a nutrition-minded customer will care about most. Some brands remove bone entirely and hit their calcium and mineral numbers with isolated or synthetic supplements. We keep the bone in, so the minerals come from whole food rather than being added back afterwards.
One whole-prey ratio across the whole range. Pure, Gourmet and the Signature Blends are all built the same way. Learn it once and you can explain every product in the freezer.
Human grade, with nothing padding it out. Hormone and antibiotic free. No fillers, no preservatives. In a category where "meat by-products" and starch bulking are common, that's a real difference rather than a slogan.
A true single-protein Pure line. Plenty of brands sell only mixed blends. Real single-protein options mean you can help a customer with a reactive dog run a proper elimination diet — one of the hardest problems a customer brings you, and one you can solve out of this freezer. And because production is fully cleaned down between proteins, that elimination diet is actually reliable.
No HPP. We don't pasteurise. Covered properly in Lesson 5 — the short version is that high-pressure processing kills the beneficial bacteria and enzymes along with the harmful ones, which defeats the point.
We don't overclaim. Much of the range is grass-fed and free-range, but not all of it, so we don't advertise it that way — while other companies still do. A small thing that tells a customer a great deal.
The recipes don't change. That's the whole point.
This is the one to remember, because it closes the loop on everything in Lesson 1.
Raw Performance exists because its founders couldn't buy raw food that was consistent — products that varied batch to batch, poorly mixed, unreliable. A company founded on that frustration doesn't then go and quietly reformulate.
Other brands do change. Recipes get reworked over the years, usually to bring costs down, and the food a customer bought two years ago isn't quite the food in the bag today. We don't do that. Customers have fed our food for years and built their dog's routine around it — some of them feeding dogs with real sensitivities, where a quiet formulation change is a genuine problem, not an inconvenience.
The food you sell today is the food you'll be selling next year.
Made in our own facility in Niagara, since 2012. Not designed here and produced elsewhere. That's why the mix is consistent tub to tub.
Ontario farms. Local sourcing, with wild-caught BC salmon as the deliberate exception. Short supply chains, and we know where the food comes from.
Here's how Raw Performance describes its side of the relationship with your store:
Great products. A brand worth standing behind. A partner invested in your success.
Our goal isn't simply to be another brand on your shelf. It's to be one of the brands you can rely on.
That's a promise made to your owner or manager, and in practice it means four things: education, resources, marketing support, and actual personal attention. The relationship doesn't end when the order arrives at your door.
You might reasonably wonder why any of that matters to you, standing at the freezer on a Saturday afternoon.
It matters because it's the reason you're never stuck. A customer asks something nobody has ever asked you before — an unusual allergy, a dog on medication, a breeder asking about weaning — and there are real people who will answer. You are not the last line of defence. That's a genuinely different experience from selling a brand whose entire support offering is a printed sell sheet and an email address nobody replies to.
It's a small team, so you get people rather than a ticket number.
(289) 272-0454 · hello@rawperformancedogfood.com
Worth putting those somewhere near the freezer. A question answered while the customer is still standing in front of you is worth far more than one answered by email the next day.
The training you're reading right now is that promise in action. Brands that don't care whether you can explain their product don't build one of these.
On the floor
When a customer asks how it compares to the brand next to it: "They're both raw. Ours is made in Niagara in their own facility, the meat's human grade from Ontario farms, and there's a single-protein Pure line if your dog has sensitivities. That last part is why I'd start you here."
When a customer is nervous about committing to a brand: "One thing I'd say for them — they've never changed their recipes. A lot of brands quietly reformulate to save money, and if your dog's sensitive that's a real headache. What you buy today is what you'll be buying in two years."
When a customer asks about calcium or bone: "The bone's actually in the food — that's where the calcium comes from. Some brands take the bone out and add a calcium supplement instead. This one keeps it as whole food."
Never bad-mouth the other brand in the freezer. Explain what ours does and let the customer decide. A customer who feels sold to doesn't come back — and they're standing in your shop, not ours, so a pushy sale costs your store more than it costs us.
