Hi there beefriends and kittyfriends! It's your friendly neighborhood mad catter here to give a review for Stella & Chewy's, a raw cat food.
Spoiler alert: this one. This one is the winner.
Many moons ago I tried pretty much ALL the raw cat foods available, back when I was trying to figure out what was making Yuan sick (answer: food allergies). I tried everything but making it myself. Most of the raw brands, the cats wouldn't even touch (and I had three of them then; this was before Deidre crossed the bridge). There was one that Maggie did love (Rad Cat), but they have since gone out of business (sob); and the only one that they would even try was Stella & Chewy's.
At the time, the pattern was that Deidre would eat it as intended (when it's freeze dried, you add water and mush it up to make it into a wet food again), and Yuan wanted it dry, like treats, but if I added water, he wasn't into it. Maggie wasn't interested. So after Deidre crossed the bridge, I would still buy it occasionally mostly as treats, but not super often.
A few years back, S&C started offering frozen instead of freeze dried, so I tried those too, and this time Maggie was into it, but Yuan was still firmly in the land of "meh." Which is funny, because usually Maggie is the finicky one and Yuan is easier to please.
In the course of figuring out Yuan's food allergies, at first the vet and I had thought that he was allergic to fish AND poultry, so I was buying rabbit meat food for him (pretty much any of the other options always had fish or poultry in them; I'm looking at you, Natural Balance "Limited Ingredient Diet" venison that actually has fish oil in it and gave him the barfs). So the Stella and Chewy's that I had been buying had been their rabbit kind, since it's one of the few safe foods that had neither fish or poultry in it. When I realized that Yuan could indeed eat poultry (yay!), I tried the chicken Stella and Chewy's freeze dried. They both mostly ate it, but sometimes were bored with it and would leave some behind.
Then I tried the Duck Duck Goose.
Winner winner, chicken duck and goose dinner!
They LOVE it. How do I know? Because they HOOVER it every time. They almost never do that, with pretty much all food. I know Yuan's a chonker, but he doesn't eat as much as you would assume based on his heckin' chonk status. Both of them have a tendency to nosh a little, leave, go back later, nosh a little more, leave...
But when I break out the Duck Duck Goose, they are HERE for it.
The position of this photo makes me giggle, because it makes Maggie look like a buffalo. She's a skinny mini senior in reality.
See? Skinny mini. I promise she eats 4-5 times a day.
I have also tried the cartons of Stella & Chewy's, which is not raw but more like canned food but in a little juice box style carton instead of a can. The chicken morsels were a winner, and the turkey morsels, not so much. I haven't gotten to try the pate yet because it's always sold out when I have money.
Cat ambrosia.
So, in summation: I will be buying the Duck Duck Goose Stella & Chewy's on the regular now. :)
Obviously every cat's tastes are different, as evidenced by my own cats' hit-or-miss reactions to the same food and different flavors of it. But I share this because sometimes it can be the texture, and sometimes it can be the flavor/ingredients that makes the difference. Raw food is healthy for cats, so I really wanted to find one that they like, and Stella & Chewy's is really good quality. So I'm really happy I finally found one that they BOTH like, and is good for them.
Extra bonus: there's also a lot less packaging when you're just buying one big bag of light freeze dried pieces instead of a couple of cases of cans, in a cardboard tray and wrapped in shrink wrap. So, win for the environment on the packaging front, too. :)
The biggest bag I think (the one I have now) is 18 ounces, which doesn't sound like a lot but it's a bag the size of your head because they are that lightweight. You can tailor the portions to as much or as little as you need since it's all just little nuggets, and the bag reseals so it doesn't dry out or go bad.
If you decide to try it, let me know how your cats like it! Happy Caturday!
