Raw Feeding Starter Checklist: Gear, Portions, and First Week

If you have just decided to start feeding your dog raw and you are staring at a tab with seventeen browser windows open trying to figure out what to actually buy first, this is the page you wanted. There is a real chance to overcomplicate the first month of raw feeding, and most of the gear blog posts on the internet bury the simple answer under a wall of optional equipment. I have been doing this for two years with my own dog and I have walked a lot of new raw feeders through their first month. Here is the actual starter checklist, cut down to what you really need.

The two things most new raw feeders get wrong are spending hours chasing DIY sourcing when a commercial 80:10:10 grind will cover everything, and buying specialty raw-feeding gadgets that end up in a drawer by week three. The whole idea with month one is to keep the routine boring. Get the food, get the five pieces of gear, portion to your dogs weight, run a calm first week. That is the list.

What to buy for month one

**One commercial 80:10:10 grind.** Buy the food first, not the freezer. PurePrey and a handful of other brands publish the ratio on the label and post third-party nutritional analysis of every batch. That is the entire game for the first month: muscle, organ, bone in the published ratio, frozen, shipped to your door. We have written up exactly what the 80:10:10 ratio means and why dogs digest it differently from kibble in Why the 80:10:10 ratio matters. No sourcing from three butchers, no recipe building, no spreadsheet. Boring is what you want.

**A single 5 lb pack to start.** Do not order a 20 lb subscription on day one. Get one 5 lb pack of chicken, feed it for a week, and confirm your dog does well on it before you commit. If your dog is a small breed, 5 lb might be two full weeks of food. If your dog is a giant breed, 5 lb is three days, and you should jump to a 10 lb pack once you have confirmed tolerance.

**A protein rotation plan on paper, not in your head.** Decide before your first order which protein you are starting (chicken is the right default for almost every dog), and which two you will rotate in once the transition is complete. PurePrey ships chicken, turkey, and beef. Starting with chicken and rotating in beef at week two gives you variety without overloading the gut during the transition. If you have not yet timed the switch itself, our How to Switch to Raw Dog Food page walks through the seven-day timeline.

**A printed copy of the food safety rules.** Tape it inside a cabinet door. The Raw Dog Food Safety Guide is the version I hand to first-month customers. Five minutes to skim now saves you from improvising on the day a 10 lb pack of frozen grind lands on your porch.

That is the food side. Now the gear.

Common gear: the five things worth buying

Skip the marmite-style "raw feeding starter kits" with branded scoops. Every item below is something you can buy at a regular kitchen or hardware store, and they are the only ones I have actually used for two years.

**Chest freezer or dedicated freezer shelf.** A typical 40 lb dog eats about 1 lb of raw per day, which is roughly 30 lb per month. A small dog is 7 to 8 lb a month. A chest freezer is the gold standard because it holds temperature better than a fridge-freezer combo, especially when you are stacking 10 lb packs, but a clearly labeled shelf in your existing freezer works fine for the first month. Label the shelf with a piece of tape. Raw meat sitting next to the ice cream is the confusion nobody needs.

**Kitchen scale, 0.1 g resolution.** You will weigh every meal for at least the first three months, and after that you will still weigh every meal when you portion ahead for the week. Pick a scale that reads to the nearest tenth of a gram, has a tare button, and has a flat surface large enough to set a small bowl on. Anything fancier is wasted money. Anything less precise will leave you guessing at portion sizes within 10 to 20 percent, which adds up over a month.

**Boning or utility knife and a dedicated cutting board.** You do not need a butcher knife. A 6 to 8 inch boning knife or a sharp utility knife is the right size for trimming whole-food adds or breaking up a frozen pack. The dedicated cutting board matters more than the knife. Color-coded red boards for raw protein keep the rule visible. If you have read the Raw Dog Food Safety Guide, you already know the dedicated-utensils rule is non-negotiable.

**Airtight containers or silicone trays for daily portions.** These are honestly the single biggest quality-of-life upgrade for raw feeding. Pre-portion the next three to five days into individual containers or silicone trays the night before. Pull one out of the freezer in the morning, drop it into the fridge to thaw, and serve it at the next meal. No weighing at the bowl, no half-thawed lump, no last-minute scramble. A set of 8 to 10 small silicone trays is the right answer for most households.

**A small fridge thermometer.** Standalone freezers and fridge-freezer combos drift. A $10 thermometer inside the freezer tells you whether you are actually at 0 °F before you trust a half-year of food to it. If the temp creeps above 10 °F, you will know before you start getting texture or smell issues in the grind.

Total cost for the gear list above: about $150 to $250, depending on whether you already own a freezer or need to budget one.

Portion sizes by dog weight

The rule of thumb is roughly 2 to 3 percent of your dogs body weight per day. Active dogs and lean dogs sit closer to 3 percent. Senior, less active, and weight-prone dogs sit closer to 2 percent. Puppies eat more as a percentage, often 5 to 10 percent, but that is a separate conversation.

| Dog weight (lb) | Daily portion (lb) | Monthly bags (5 lb) | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | 10 (toy) | 0.25 | 2 | Lean toward 3% for active small breeds | | 20 (small) | 0.5 | 3 | Standard 2.5% works for most adults | | 40 (medium) | 1.0 | 6 | The most common benchmark in raw-feeding guides | | 60 (large) | 1.4 | 9 | Lean toward 2% to manage weight on labs and goldens | | 90 (giant) | 1.8 | 11 | Active giants may need closer to 2.5%; monitor body condition |

The 40 lb row is the one most feeding calculators lean on because it is the average adult weight in the United States, and you can scale linearly from there for your own dog. If your dog is at an ideal body condition score, you are dialing in the right amount. If you can feel the ribs easily without pressing, you are close. If you cannot feel them at all, drop the daily portion by about 10 percent for two weeks and reassess.

For monthly budget context, our Raw Dog Food Cost Comparison 2026 breaks down what the table above works out to in real dollars for a 40 lb dog running an 80:10:10 program.

First-week transition tips

Day one of raw is not the moment to also change the protein, change the meal time, change everything else, and expect the dog to settle. Keep the routine boring and let the food do the work.

**Pick a single protein for the first week.** Chicken is the default for most dogs. If your dog has had chicken-based kibble before, this is the closest possible match and the easiest transition. Hold the protein the same for the full first week, even as you bring the new grind in as a topper. We have written up the full 7-day mixing ratios in How to Switch to Raw Dog Food, but the short version is to start at 25 percent raw for days one and two and step up from there.

**Anchor meals to the same time twice a day.** Twice a day is the typical adult schedule. Pick the times now and do not move them during the transition. A dog that eats at 7 am and 6 pm every day produces predictable stool patterns, and predictable stool is what tells you whether the transition is working.

**Watch stool for 24 to 48 hours after each step.** One soft stool after a new protein is normal adaptation. Persistent soft stool for more than two days is a signal to drop back a step in the timeline. This is the single most useful diagnostic you have during the first week, and it costs nothing.

**Keep water access constant.** A dog on raw retains less water than a dog on kibble because the food itself is roughly 70 percent moisture. Make sure fresh water is available at all times, especially in the first 72 hours. Some dogs drink noticeably more during the transition, and that is fine.

**Skip treats for the first week.** No raw bones, no training treats, no dental chews, no table food. The fewer variables you introduce in week one, the easier it is to tell whether the new food is the cause of anything that goes wrong. Training treats can come back in week two, ideally single-ingredient freeze-dried protein of the same animal you are feeding.

If your dog has a history of GI sensitivity or recent antibiotics, drop the steps down to half the speed described in the transition guide. Slow and boring is the right answer for sensitive dogs.

A reasonable first-month budget

For the 40 lb dog, the most common profile:

- One chicken-based 5 lb pack: about $45 - One beef-based 5 lb pack: about $50 - One turkey-based 5 lb pack: about $48 - One additional 5 lb chicken pack to cover week four: about $45 - Five silicone trays: about $25 - One kitchen scale: about $30 - One cutting board and one utility knife: about $40

That is roughly $280 to $320 to cover food plus gear, with about $190 of that being a one-time gear cost you will not repeat. The real per-month food cost after the first month lands in the $240 to $270 range we cover in the cost comparison post.

The honest short list

If you want the entire starter checklist in five lines, here it is. Everything else is optional.

1. One commercial 80:10:10 grind, chicken as the starter protein. 2. Five pounds to start, scale up after week one. 3. One chest freezer or one labeled freezer shelf. 4. One kitchen scale, one cutting board, one knife. 5. A printed safety checklist and a printed transition timeline.

A first month that stays close to this list is a first month that succeeds. Almost every failed start I have seen traces back to overcomplication: a DIY recipe before the dog has been on a balanced grind long enough to calibrate, a grain-free fancy super-premium raw food at twice the price for no real benefit, a stack of new gear that ends up unused. Boring wins.

For the exact gram weight at your dog's kilograms, skip the table arithmetic and open the 80:10:10 portion calculator — it returns the daily portion and monthly bag count without manual math.

See the starter pack at /shop.