Why we love meal toppers

Feeding your dog doesn’t mean you have to resign them to the same boring meal every day forever (not that there’s anything wrong with it, you do you). Meal toppers are a great way to add interesting nutritional variety, improve palatability, and make meals more exciting without having to completely reorganise your routine.

A good topper can:

• Support your pet’s digestion, cognitive health, immune system, and overall health.
• Make meals more palatable for even the pickiest eaters (especially if you need to sneak supplements or medication in).
• Add nutritional variety and bioavailable nutrients that your pet might not normally get from a standard bag.

There’s a caveat though; many toppers are highly concentrated in certain nutrients, which can throw off the balance of the main diet if you’re not careful. This can be an issue particularly if you’re feeding the same toppers every day, and more so with things like liver based toppers that can be really high in vitamin A and copper.

Some toppers include pretty empty filler ingredients you’d rather avoid, or that are already in the main food you’re feeding (think topper with a mostly carb base sprinkled on a kibble). Others promise you the world while delivering… not much …or make vague promises that don’t actually mean anything at all. More is not always better.

Our nutritionist (hi 👋🏽) recommends limiting toppers to no more than 20% of the meal, and rotating between a few different ones with different ingredients and benefits. It’s also important to accomodate for the fact that freeze and air-dried toppers are very nutrient dense because they’re essentially a concentrated form of the fresh food they were made from.

This is actually part of the inspiration behind our freakshakes - they’re essentially a topper that you add water too, making it less energy dense by weight and more versatile than peanut butter in your enrichment.

Think of freakshakes as your one-stop-shop; you can mix them with food or use them as meal toppers and enrichment. Every one of our drink powders is formulated to give your pet the health benefits that they deserve like hydration, palatability, gut support, allergy support, essential nutrients, antioxidants, and nutritional variety across different and hard to source proteins and organs.

Feeding your pet well shouldn’t feel like a second job. Give yourself permission to do the bare minimum for maximum benefit! With Norm, we guarantee it’s easy and maybe a little weird, but that’s just the way we like it.