Of everything Stella & Chewy's makes in freeze-dried, the chicken is the leanest and the highest in protein. Forty-eight percent protein, twenty-eight percent fat. Nothing else in the line comes close on that combination, and it is the reason we reach for it first with a certain kind of dog.
Who that is: a dog who could stand to lose a few pounds, a dog already getting plenty of fat elsewhere in the bowl, or an owner who wants freeze-dried raw as a topper without quietly adding a meal's worth of calories to the day. At 4,420 kilocalories per kilogram it is the lowest-calorie option among the dinner patties. The difference against the lamb or duck is close to a fifth.
Come weigh the options with us if you are not sure. We are at 1288 Highway 33 in Farmingdale and this is a two minute conversation with a bag in hand, which beats guessing from a phone screen.
Now the thing almost nobody knows, and it is the best fact we have found about this brand.
Stella sells the chicken recipe in three different formats, and they are the same food. Chewy's Chicken dinner patties, Chewy's Chicken Meal Mixers, and the chicken Dinner Dust all carry forty-eight percent protein and twenty-eight percent fat, with the same ingredient list in the same order, and calorie densities within twenty kilocalories per kilogram of one another. What changes between them is the shape of the piece, the feeding chart, and what Stella says each one can replace. The patties carry the complete and balanced description. The mixers offer a feeding chart with both a complete-meal column and a topper column. The dust is labeled supplemental only. So you are choosing a format and a use, not three different recipes, and the price difference between formats is not buying you a different food.
What is in it: ninety-five percent cage-free chicken, organs and bone. Chicken with ground bone leads, then chicken liver and chicken gizzard. After that it is pumpkin seed and a run of organic produce, cranberries, spinach, broccoli, beets, carrots, squash and blueberries. Taurine added, a vitamin and mineral package, and the four probiotic strains with a twenty million CFU per pound guarantee.
It is pea-free, lentil-free and potato-free, which matters more than it sounds. Stella's grain-free kibble lists peas and lentils third and fourth. The freeze-dried does not. People who chose this brand for that reason sometimes buy the kibble assuming it matches, and it does not.
Sixty kilocalories per patty is the number worth writing on the inside of your cabinet door. It makes portioning arithmetic instead of guesswork.
Our mild dissent on the whole category: chicken gets treated as the boring default and the novel proteins get treated as upgrades. For a dog with no history of trouble on chicken, we think that is backwards. This is the leanest, highest-protein option Stella makes, it is the one most dogs do well on, and it is the least expensive of the dinner patties. Buying rabbit because it sounds better is a real thing people do.
If you are feeding it as a topper, check which column of the chart you have been reading. The complete-meal amount and the topper amount differ by about six times.