Commercial Frozen Dinners

[togii]

Does anyone have any experience with Stella & Chewy's Frozen Dinners, and could they explain more precisely what they consist of? Their website is pretty vague.
My boys have kibble available to them at all times, but lately I've been supplementing with raw.
I made a very simple raw chicken soup with chicken breast, livers, and eggshells, and Kodo loves it (which surprised me).
I also got a sample pack of freeze-dried commercial raw products from Casey's Hidden Pantry, and he loves all the Stella & Chewy's steaks.

At the moment, Gible refuses all of the freeze-dried S&C/AFS/ZiwiPeak (even reconstructed) and will eat my homemade raw chicken "murder soup" only if I am physically holding and spoon feeding him. He'll happily sit in my lap and eagerly eat a spoon or two of the soup before he squirms away to play, but that's the only way he's eating it right now, so he's still eating mostly kibble.

So. In addition to having kibble out all the time, once in the morning and once in the evening I either thaw out two cubes of raw chicken soup (to feed a spoon or two to Gible, and let Kodo eat the rest on his own), or I shred maybe a third of one of the Stella & Chewy's Lamb or Duck steaks into kibble-sized bites and sprinkle it on top the kibble for Kodo to enjoy (and maybe Gible to sample... in my dreams).

I feel like I could slowly get Gible more excited and independent about the raw diet, but I can't hardly stand making these raw soups. Handling raw meat makes me feel so icky, and all the sanitation in the world can't keep me from thinking that my kitchen is somehow tainted. After using my blender to pulverize raw chicken, I don't think I can use it for anything else again.
I know that's ridiculous. Intellectually I know I clean everything well enough to kill any germs three times over.. but ew! I don't even buy raw meat to cook for myself.
My recipe doesn't seem complete enough, I know breast+liver+eggshell isn't very awesome for them, but I dread making even that.
Kodo loves the soup too much for me to stop feeding it to him, though, so I wondered if there was a similar commercial alternative.

Kodo's favorite Stella and Chewy's makes a frozen raw dinner product, so I was wondering how similar it was to either frozen soup ice cubes or freeze dried patties. Is that even a product that's good for them? Is there another brand or item that's closer to what I want?
I usually have to drive to the Treats Unleashed in St Louis to get my foodstuffs, and the employees are always surprised when I tell them I'm buying Evo and S&C for ferrets. They'd never heard of feeding anything like that to a ferret before, so I didn't figure I could ask them their opinion on the frozen dinners, haha.
(I make it a point to mention the woozles every time I go in there, now, though, in case they get a customer who wanders in and asks them if they sell anything they could feed a ferret).

Sorry for making this so wordy. Scold me if anything I've described is unsafe or unhealthy for the little guys, by the way. They were four years old and completely imprinted on a single medium-quality brand of kibble when I got them, so I'm trying to make little baby-step improvements to their diet.

[sherrylynne]

Stella and Chewy's is actually pretty good for them I've never tried the raw, but I have used the freeze dried before. They are a hit with both cats and ferrets! As for something comparable, freeze dried, Wysong's Archetypal 1 Ferret, AFS patties, and stay away from Nature's Variety freeze dried- it has pumpkin seeds, both whole and partial(blockage waiting to happen).
For frozen, the first ingredients should be meat/bone/organ, before anything else. And that "anything else" shouldn't consist of more than 5% of the total ingredients. There are many commercial raws out there. I use Urban Carnivore, but I think that's still only available in Canada.
Whichever one you get, though, will still likely have to go through the blender, unless you can get them accepting textures!

[katt]

The freeze dried is fantastic. I am going to be trying the frozen raw for Koda (who has IBD) here in a few weeks when the store gets it in.

[mustelidmusk]

I've been feeding Stella & Chewy's frozen and freeze-dried raw for years. I feed a mix of brands because I doubt any single brand covers everything in the nutritional spectrum. My kids are 5.5 years old and doing VERY well.

he primary products I've been feeding include:

Frozen: Mostly Nature's Variety, some Stella and Chewy's
Freeze Dried: Mostly Wyong archetypal I and some Stella and Chewy's

Do NOT use Nature's Variety freeze rid foods since they caintain large bits of pumpkin seed (even whole seeds) that may cause blockages.

-jennifer

[bigsis7]

I love Stella and Chewy's along with Ziwipeak! Very good quality and all my ferrets loved it. I would usually feed half a patty per ferret and then some ziwipeak to them a few times a week. Some people feed it as their ferrets whole diet and they do very well, you just have to make sure to get variety in there.