Questions and Answers
Due to the complexities involved with shipping raw frozen products, we do not currently offer a direct buy program. Tucker's products are available at local pet retailers. Find a store near you: https://www.mytuckers.com/where-to-buy
All our retailer partners are able to place a special order for any Tucker's product on a weekly basis. Contact the manager of your local store to have them special order the product you're looking for.
Contact your local store directly for product availability: https://www.mytuckers.com/where-to-buy. If they don't stock the product, ask them to special order the formula you're looking for. All retailers are able to place a special order for Tucker's product through their distributor on a weekly basis upon request.
Click on each individual product to view its Guaranteed Analysis and other nutritional information.
Frozen Dog Diets: https://www.mytuckers.com/frozen-raw-dog-food
Freeze-Dried Dog Diets: https://www.mytuckers.com/freeze-dried-raw-dog-food
As Tucker's product is 95% human grade meat, you can treat it no differently than you would any meat you'd buy from the butcher or grocery store. We recommend using the food within 3-4 days of thawing, but you can use the same smell/see practices as with human meat products to determine freshness. Make sure the thawed food is stored in the fridge in a covered container for maximum freshness.
Tucker's offers a Frequent Buyer Program at participating retailers. Please contact your local store directly for more information on what programs they participate in and if they can offer you any store-specific coupons to use on Tucker's products.
All Tucker's products are manufactured in our own USDA Human Edible Facility in Southeastern Wisconsin. This means that we make food products for people and pets in the same facility. Our raw diets and foods are manufactured under USDA oversight on the same production floor where we make foods for schools, retail stores, and restaurants.
All the proteins we use in our formulas are inspected and sourced exclusively from the USA. We put special emphasis on trying to reduce our carbon footprint and support local farms by sourcing many of our ingredients from Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Our salmon is wild-caught in the Pacific Northwest.
In developing our Formulas, we work with 3 out of the 10 PhD Zoological Nutritionists in the world. With their strong background in carnivore nutrition and focus on a canine's/feline's hardwired nature to eat raw meat, they've helped us create our 95/5 raw diets.
With HPP (High Pressure Processing), product MUST be vacuum sealed in food grade plastic/film. Unlike most other companies, we take a human food approach to using HPP and vacuum seal each individual serving. This allows us to HPP our patties in their final packaging and ensure they're never opened prior to use. This is the same way juices, dressings, dips, and other meats are processed before going to your local grocery store.
All Tucker's Formulas are 95/5, meaning they are 95% meat, organ, bone, and marrow with 5% pumpkin.
Tucker's is committed to providing the freshest and safest raw diets available and we make food safety a priority. With all our raw foods, we use a Test & Hold Protocol. Batches are sent to an independent lab to be tested for pathogens and the product is only released once the sample results have been confirmed negative.
For our Frozen, we HPP (high pressure process) most of the recipes. We deep freeze our pork and salmon at -30 degrees F for a 3-7 days to address any potential parasites.
We use a probiotic blend in our Freeze-Dried to control pathogens.
Yes. All Tucker's Frozen and Freeze-Dried Formulas offer Complete and Balanced nutrition for All Life Stages, including the growth of large size dogs (70lbs or more as an adult).
Yes. All our Frozen Formulas for cats offer Complete and Balanced nutrition for All Life Stages.
Tucker's takes great pride in making simple and minimally processed complete and balanced diets. In doing so, we do not add any binders or processing aids for visual consistency. As every walking animal is different, you may see a slight variation in the overall density or texture of our products from batch to batch. You can use the below Measured Feeding Table for feeding our freeze-dried product if the pieces aren't whole:
Below are Tucker's Frozen Raw Formulas that undergo HPP (High Pressure Processing) and those that don’t:
HPP
Beef-Pumpkin
Turkey-Pumpkin
Chicken-Pumpkin
Turf & Surf
Pork-Duck-Pumpkin
Not HPP
Pork-Bison-Pumpkin
Pork-Lamb-Pumpkin
Pork-Beef-Pumpkin
Salmon-Pumpkin
We deep freeze our pork and salmon at -30 degrees F for 3-7 days to address any potential parasites.
One of the most commonly used methods for helping to keep products free from pathogens in the human food supply chain is HPP (High Pressure Processing). HPP eliminates any harmful bacteria from the food by using cold water at an extremely high pressure. Since there is no heating or cooking involved, the food retains it's nutrients.
We actually don't use more plastic than other companies. Most companies HPP (High Pressure Process) their food in 10-20 lb vacuum sealed packages. This product is then brought back to their facilities to be shaped into patties. The product is reintroduced to people and equipment and the plastic is thrown away. Instead of throwing away the required film, Tucker's uses it to benefit product freshness and consumer convenience, while avoiding the risk of recontamination.
Pumpkin is a great low glycemic fiber source and offers digestive support that is especially helpful when transitioning a pet to a raw diet.
Tucker's is backed by zoo science and we work with the leading experts in carnivore nutrition to formulate our 95/5 raw diets. Our science tells us that dogs and cats do not need fruit or vegetable carbohydrates in their diets. We use 5% pumpkin in all our diets as the fiber source and all formulas are complete and balanced per AAFCO.
78-82% muscle meat
10-12% organ
3-5% bone
5% pumpkin
All Tucker's Formulas are emulsified for maximum absorption.
One of the things we've learned is that you cannot control how quickly food moves through an animal's body. However, by changing the size of the particulate, you can change absorption. This is one of the main reasons that we focus on emulsification instead of a multi-grind process.
Most pet food companies will grind and then regrind their product to reduce it down to a workable size. Emulsification results in an even smaller and more digestible product. The smaller the particulate, the more accumulative surface area is available for our pets to absorb the available nutrients. With cats and dogs having such short digestive tracts, providing the added surface area allows them to absorb more nutrients in a short period of time.
The easiest way to feed our raw frozen diets is to place the next day's portions in the fridge overnight to thaw. To avoid the mess of any moisture leakage during thawing, place the vacuum sealed patty in a dish or place an unwrapped patty in a sealed/covered container.
To feed as a complete and balanced meal, crumble the recommended number of bars into a bowl and serve. If you feed the bars dry, make sure your dog drinks plenty of fresh water at mealtime.
We recommend rehydrating the food with water. Add approximately 1/4 cup of water for every 15 bars fed. To speed up rehydration, crumble the bars, add water, and mix.
You can also feed our Freeze-Dried as a topper. Simply crumble the bars over your dog's food and serve. Be sure to adjust their other food accordingly to avoid overfeeding.
There are approximately 100-130 pieces in each bag of freeze-dried.
There are a lot of misconceptions about pork being dirty and unsafe. In the US, pork has undergone a lot of changes over the past decade and trichinosis has been eradicated here. Because we hold our products to a human standard, we still deep freeze our pork to ensure it's parasite-free. It is stored at -30 degrees F for 3-7 days.
Where you source your salmon from and how you handle it is key in making sure it is safe for dogs. Our salmon is wild-caught from the USA. In order to make sure there are no parasites, we deep freeze our salmon at -30 degrees F for 3-7 days. Most residential freezers are not able to get cold enough, so we do not recommend that pet parents make their own homemade raw salmon diets.
Tucker's does not use Menadione Sodium Bisulfite Complex in our diets. We did list it as an ingredient on our first run of packaging/website, but chose to not use it in our formulas when we launched the product.
All packaging is being updated to remove the ingredient listing as it is not used in our diets.
No, 20lb Bulk Boxes are NOT included in any Frequent Buyer Programs. Tucker's bulk boxes are EDLP (Every Day Low Price) so a frequent buyer is essentially built into the pricing.