Nor'easter season starts now. Anyone who has kept a freezer in Monmouth County through an October storm knows the drill: the lights flicker twice, go out, and then you are standing in the kitchen doing math about how long the chest freezer will hold.
If you feed frozen raw, that math matters more than usual. A freezer full of Stella's frozen patties represents real money and a dog who expects dinner. Worth sorting out your plan before the first storm rather than during it, and if you want to talk through what you feed and what your backup looks like, that is a conversation we are happy to have at 1288 Highway 33 any day we are open.
The general rule for a full freezer is roughly forty-eight hours unopened, about half that if it is only partly full. Keep it shut. Every time the door opens you spend cold you cannot get back.
Here is the part specific to how Stella's lines are built, and it is genuinely useful during a long outage.
Freeze-dried raw is shelf stable. No refrigeration, no power, no thawing. A bag of Chewy's Chicken dinner patties in the pantry is unaffected by an outage entirely, and it carries the complete and balanced description, meaning it can carry a meal rather than just top one. That is the practical argument for keeping a bag around even if frozen raw is your everyday food. It is the one thing in the dog's diet that does not care whether the power is on.
FreshMade is the opposite case. It lives in the freezer, takes twenty-four to thirty-six hours to thaw properly in the refrigerator, and once thawed it needs using within five days. During an outage that clock is already running and the refrigerator is warming up. Plan around it.
Bone broth has its own rule people forget. The pouches are shelf stable closed and need refrigerating for up to ten days once opened. If you have an open one in the fridge when the power goes, treat it like any other opened perishable.
A small practical note that has saved people here real money. Put a cup of water in the freezer, freeze it solid, then set a coin on top of the ice. If you come home after an outage and the coin has sunk, the freezer thawed and refroze while you were gone, and you know what happened even though everything looks fine. Costs nothing and tells you something you otherwise cannot know.
Our opinion on storm prep generally, and we say this every autumn. Do not stockpile three months of frozen food because a forecast looked bad. Keep what you normally keep, add one shelf-stable bag as a backstop, and spend the energy on the flashlight and the phone charger instead. The dog will be fine. Dogs are considerably more relaxed about weather than their people are.
If you are on the frozen line specifically, remember it is pickup and local delivery only, so a storm that closes roads closes resupply too. That is another argument for the backup bag.
Go put a coin on some ice this week. It takes two minutes and you will know exactly what your freezer did the next time the lights go out.