The first week the humidity finally breaks, dogs start eating again. Every September we hear some version of it. The dog who picked at breakfast all August is suddenly cleaning the bowl, and the owner wants to know what changed. Usually nothing did, except the weather.
Appetite tracks temperature more closely than most people expect. A dog carrying a coat through a Monmouth County August is conserving energy, sleeping through the hot part of the day, and walking half as far as they did in May. Then the mornings turn and the walks stretch back out. If you cut portions in July because your dog stopped finishing meals, this is the month to put them back.
Storage is the part worth thinking about now.
Freeze-dried raw is shelf stable, which is most of its appeal. No fridge, no thawing, no mess. But shelf stable assumes a reasonable shelf. A garage in September around here still swings twenty degrees between morning and afternoon, and it holds damp long after the air outside has dried out. That's not where a bag of food should live. Press the air out, close the zipper properly, and give it a pantry shelf inside the house.
Bone broth is the exception, and it catches people.
Stella's Bountiful Bone Broth needs refrigerating once you open it, and keeps up to ten days. It comes in a three pack, which means most households open one and set the other two down next to the freeze-dried, then treat all three the same way. Different product, different rules. If you're not sure how long an open pouch has been in there, write the date on it with a marker when you open it. Takes two seconds and removes the guessing.
The other thing that shifts this month is water.
Dogs drink less as it cools, and freeze-dried food is dry by design, so a dog eating it straight from the bag is getting very little moisture from dinner. That's fine if they're drinking well. If they're not, rehydrating is worth doing. Stella's own suggestion is water or bone broth, and either works. We'd point out that a dog who has spent all summer drinking constantly and then tapers off in October isn't necessarily doing anything wrong, but it's a change worth noticing rather than ignoring.
Anyone in the store this time of year can ask us to look at what you're feeding and whether the portion still makes sense for the season. We're at 1288 Highway 33 in Farmingdale, and it's a two minute conversation, not a sales pitch.
One mild opinion, since fall is when people start buying heavier food. We're not big fans of switching a dog to a richer recipe just because the calendar turned. Dogs in New Jersey aren't sled dogs. A house dog going into October needs roughly what they needed in September, adjusted for how much they're actually moving, and the seasonal-formula idea gets recommended more than it deserves. If your dog is genuinely working outside all day, different conversation.
Go look at where your food bag is sitting right now. If the answer is the garage, move it inside before the next damp week.