VICTOR Pet Food launched three Freeze-Dried Raw Blend recipes in June and said it was "changing the conversation around freeze-dried raw feeding." The products are high-protein kibble with pieces of freeze-dried raw meat mixed in. The percentage of freeze-dried meat is not on the announcement and not on the bag. Owners who already add a freeze-dried topper to kibble at home know roughly what they are putting in the bowl. A blend bag asks you to trust the brand's ratio without telling you what it is.

The format is simple once you take it apart.

VICTOR is not alone. Open Farm showed a hybrid kibble with air-dried meat and organ inclusions at Global Pet Expo in March, and the show floor was full of toppers, mixers, and inclusions built to ride on top of a conventional pellet. [2] The trade press describes these formats as among the most prevalent new launches of the year. The extrusion process underneath them has not changed.

Freeze-dried raw is expensive to make and kibble is cheap. The ratio decides which one you are buying.

Packaged Facts found that 9% of owners already add freeze-dried or air-dried food to kibble, and 25% add some kind of topper or mixer. [3] Those owners control the ratio themselves. A blend bag takes that decision away and sells it back as convenience. The manufacturer picks the ratio, the manufacturer sets the price, and the manufacturer declines to print the one number that would let you compare the two.

The blend exists because of what is happening in independent pet stores.

That is a smart business move. It is also the reason a shopper should slow down in that aisle. The phrase "freeze-dried raw" on a blend bag is doing the work the ingredient panel should do. The processing difference between a true freeze-dried complete diet and an extruded pellet is the whole reason freeze-dried costs more. Mixing a little of one into a lot of the other does not split the difference. It mostly delivers the pellet.

Five questions answer most of it.

A reader who does this math will usually land in one of two places. Either the blend is a decent kibble with a small premium for a few meat chunks, or it is a worse deal than buying the two parts separately. Neither answer is a reason to be angry at VICTOR, which is selling what the market is asking for. Both are a reason to know what you are paying for.

Every time a format outside kibble gains ground, the kibble aisle grows a version of it. Grain-free kibble answered the raw movement. "Fresh" rolls from Hill's answered the fresh movement. Freeze-dried raw blends are kibble's answer to freeze-dried raw, and like the others, they keep the extruder running and put the new word on the front of the bag. The freeze-dried pieces in a blend are real. So is the pellet they are sitting on, and the pellet is most of what your dog is eating.