Dog Food
Stella & Chewy's Raw Coated Cage-Free Chicken Recipe Review
Grain-free raw-coated kibble with organ meats, organic produce, and high-dose joint support, priced at a premium.
Read Review →
In 1997, Marie Moody — a fashion marketing professional living in New York City — adopted a dog named Stella from a local shelter. Shortly after, she adopted a second rescue, Chewy, as a companion. Chewy arrived sick. Severely sick. A shelter veterinarian warned Moody not to adopt him at all. She did anyway. On the vet's recommendation, Moody began feeding Chewy a homemade raw diet of meat, fruits, and vegetables. His recovery was dramatic — the autoimmune symptoms cleared, his energy returned, and both dogs thrived on the new food. By 2003, Moody had quit fashion, filled her tiny Brooklyn brownstone with industrial freezers, and begun hand-making small batches of raw pet food. She delivered them to Manhattan pet stores by taxi. That image — a woman hauling frozen dog food across New York in the back of a cab — became the founding myth of one of the most successful premium pet food brands in America. Within a few years, Moody moved the operation to her home state of Wisconsin to be closer to the meat supply chain. In 2013, private equity firm Stripes acquired the brand and fuelled national expansion. Today, Stella & Chewy's operates out of a 164,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, under CEO Jay Thompson, with Marie Moody remaining as founder and board advisor.
There are dozens of raw pet food brands on the market. Stella & Chewy's dominates the category for one reason: it made raw accessible. Before Stella & Chewy's, feeding raw meant buying bulk frozen meat, portioning it yourself, worrying about bacteria, and dedicating freezer space. Moody's innovation was packaging raw nutrition in formats that felt almost as convenient as kibble — freeze-dried patties and meal mixers that sit on a shelf at room temperature, rehydrate with warm water in minutes, and deliver the nutritional profile of a raw diet without the mess. The freeze-dried format became the brand's signature and the category's growth engine. Today, Stella & Chewy's holds the number-one position in freeze-dried raw pet food in the United States, and the format has become so mainstream that competitors from Instinct to Primal to Wellness CORE have all launched their own versions.
Stella & Chewy's recall history is limited to 2015, but it was a rough year. In July, the Maryland Department of Agriculture detected Listeria monocytogenes in a lot of freeze-dried chicken dinner patties. Stella & Chewy's voluntarily recalled 11 products as a precaution — most had not tested positive but may have been exposed during production. In December of the same year, a second recall followed for similar reasons, covering frozen raw morsels and patties. No pet or human illnesses were reported in either incident. The company responded by investing heavily in its food safety infrastructure, including enhanced HPP protocols, third-party pathogen testing on every batch, and a root-cause analysis conducted with external food safety experts. Since December 2015, Stella & Chewy's has had zero recalls — over a decade of clean production. The Listeria incidents were a genuine failure for a brand that markets itself on quality and safety, but the response was thorough and the track record since has been spotless.
Stella & Chewy's is not cheap. A 14-ounce bag of freeze-dried dinner patties — enough for roughly a week of meals for a small dog — retails around $30–$40. Feeding a medium or large dog exclusively on freeze-dried raw can easily exceed $150 per month. That is why the Meal Mixers and Raw Coated Kibble lines exist: they let owners add raw nutrition at a fraction of the full raw cost. The brand is widely available at independent pet stores, PetSmart, Petco, Chewy, and Amazon, and its retail footprint has grown consistently under the current leadership. For pet owners who want the nutritional benefits of raw without the DIY hassle, Stella & Chewy's remains the benchmark. The ingredient sourcing is transparent (cage-free poultry, grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish), the manufacturing is in-house, and the safety record post-2015 is clean. It is the brand that proved raw pet food could be a mainstream category, and it still leads it.
1 review — sorted by rating.
Grain-free raw-coated kibble with organ meats, organic produce, and high-dose joint support, priced at a premium.
Read Review →