Raw feeding a Miniature Schnauzer while travelling

Feeding raw while travelling regularly is one of the trickier logistics puzzles in dog ownership — you're not always near a reliable freezer, and skipping meals or switching foods constantly is exactly what causes the nutritional gaps that make raw feeding go wrong. Raw done well is genuinely excellent for dogs, but balance and sourcing are everything, and that's harder to maintain on the road. To point you in the right direction: what breed and size is your dog, have you fed raw before, and are you looking for a complete ready-made option or planning to prep it yourself?

Good — a complete ready-made option is absolutely the right call for your situation, and it means you don't have to think about balancing meat, organ, and bone ratios yourself, which is genuinely easy to get wrong even at home. For a Schnauzer at 8kg, you're looking at roughly 160g of food per day. The key question for travel is format — are you typically staying somewhere with a freezer, like a holiday let or hotel with a kitchenette, or are you regularly without any freezing facility at all?

That split is really useful to know. For the freezer trips you're fine with standard frozen raw, but that one-in-three hotel scenario is where a lot of raw feeders come unstuck. What I'd recommend as your core product is Natures Menu Country Hunter Raw Nuggets — they come in 1kg resealable bags of frozen nuggets, they're nutritionally complete with meat, offal and bone already balanced, and crucially they thaw quickly in a fridge overnight. For the hotel stays, Natures Menu also makes a freeze-dried version of the same product — the pouches are shelf-stable, no freezer needed, and you just add water. Keeping a few of those in your bag covers you when you don't have freezer access without switching your dog to a completely different food. Same brand, same protein options, same nutritional profile — his gut won't notice the difference.

At 8kg and on a maintenance diet, you want roughly 2% of his body weight per day — so about 160g, which works out to just under a quarter of a 1kg bag. Split it into two meals if you can, especially while he's adjusting. For the transition: don't go cold turkey. Over 7 to 10 days, mix increasing amounts of the raw in with his current food — start at about 25% raw and work up gradually. Schnauzers can have sensitive digestive systems and some are prone to pancreatitis, so keep the fat content in mind when choosing protein. Natures Menu's chicken or turkey nuggets are leaner than the beef or duck options, which is worth knowing for this breed specifically.

If you're feeding the Natures Menu Country Hunter nuggets as the sole diet, no — they're formulated to be complete and balanced, so you shouldn't need to add anything. Where people run into trouble is when they use completes as a base and then start throwing in extras without understanding what they're adding. Stick to the complete as directed, keep fresh water available always, and you'll be in good shape. One thing worth monitoring in the first few weeks: stool consistency. Smaller, firmer stools are normal on raw — that's fine. Loose or very pale stools for more than a few days can mean the fat content is too high or the transition was too fast, so ease back if that happens.