DIY Dog Treats

Interested in making your own meaty dog treats? Here are some things to consider.

Making your own dog treats can be a fun way to try new products, but handling raw materials requires an understanding of food safety to keep everyone healthy. Always remember to keep your workspace and equipment clean, and separate your raw ingredients from your cooked ingredients.

The next choice is to determine how you want to cook your treats and make them shelf-stable. There are a handful of different ways to make your own dog treats. You can bake, air-dry, freeze-dry, or dehydrate to get a finished product. Each method requires different equipment and will give you a different finished product.

At Farm Hounds, we choose to dehydrate our products because it allows us to heat the product to temperatures that make them safe to handle and consume, while also keeping as much nutritional value as possible. The hotter the heat, the faster you kill the harmful germs, but you also lose some of the nutritional values. Lower temperatures do allow the product to retain more nutrition, but run the risk of being more susceptible to germs/pathogens.

Dehydration also provides a texture benefit, giving our product a crunchier texture that dogs love.

Every treat or chew you make will require a different ratio of temperature and time to reach a shelf-stable state. A chicken head will dry differently from beef jerky because the heat and air hitting those ingredients will travel in and around them differently.

We’ve even found that products will behave differently throughout the seasonal changes, as humidity will also play a role in how fast products will cook.

The goal is to dry the product sufficiently so that mold can’t physically grow on it. You can test a product to see how dry it is by purchasing a water activity meter. The reading from that meter will show you how susceptible your treats are to mold.

Making your own treats takes a lot of trial and error, but as you get more and more comfortable with your equipment, the easier it becomes to get a finished product that meets your needs.

And if making your own treats seems too daunting, that’s where we come in! Shop a vast selection of safe and healthy treats and chews — starting with our Best Sellers.

Not sure where to start? Take our product quiz for recommendations!