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Every premium dog food brand uses the words “freshly prepared”. It appears on bags, in adverts and across websites — but almost nobody explains what it actually means, how it survives the manufacturing process, or whether it still means anything by the time the bag reaches your door.
At Ultimate Pet Foods, “freshly prepared” is not a marketing phrase. It’s a standard we hold to across three distinct stages — the ingredient, the cooking, and the delivery. We call that standard Freshlock™.
Freshly prepared starts before cooking. It starts with what goes into the recipe in the first place.
Every recipe in our range uses a named British meat or fish as ingredient #1 — fresh chicken, fresh salmon, fresh turkey, and so on. Not meal. Not animal derivatives. Not an unspecified protein source that could mean almost anything.
Named, fresh protein in position one means the largest ingredient in the recipe is real, traceable and collected fresh — not rendered from leftover material and dried into a powder. The difference matters because the quality of the raw ingredient determines the ceiling of what any cooking process can deliver. You cannot cook nutrition into a poor ingredient. You can only preserve what was already there.
That’s why ingredient #1 is never a compromise in any recipe we make.
Most dry dog food is made using high-temperature extrusion — ingredients forced through machinery at temperatures exceeding 150°C to 200°C under high pressure. The process is fast and cost-efficient, but it destroys a significant proportion of the proteins, natural oils and heat-sensitive vitamins present in the original ingredients.
To make the finished product palatable and nutritious, manufacturers spray synthetic flavour coatings and replacement vitamins onto the kibble after cooking. You are essentially adding back what the process destroyed.
Our Freshlock™ gentle cooking process uses 82°C — a controlled low temperature that is sufficient to ensure food safety while preserving the nutritional integrity of freshly prepared ingredients. At 82°C:
The result is kibble where the nutritional value you see on the label reflects what your dog actually absorbs — not what we started with before a high-heat process stripped it back.
This is the part most dog food brands never talk about — because most brands don’t control it.
A freshly prepared ingredient, gently cooked to preserve its nutrition, still has to get from the factory to your dog’s bowl. How long it sits in a warehouse, how quickly it’s dispatched, and when it arrives all affect how fresh the food genuinely is when your dog eats it.
At Ultimate Pet Foods, we control this end of the chain directly:
We don’t hold large volumes of stock sitting in fulfilment centres for weeks. Orders go out the same day. That means the food in your dog’s bowl is as close to the day it was made as we can make it — and the nutritional quality we protected through careful ingredient selection and gentle cooking isn’t undermined by slow fulfilment.
That’s the Freshlock™ promise. From the freshness of the ingredient, through the temperature it’s cooked at, to the speed it reaches your door.
| Traditional Kibble | Freshlock™ | |
|---|---|---|
| Ingredient #1 | Often meal or derivatives | Always named fresh meat or fish |
| Cooking temperature | 150°C–200°C+ | 82°C gentle cooking |
| Protein quality | Degraded by heat | Preserved |
| Natural oils | Damaged or lost | Intact |
| Vitamins | Destroyed, replaced synthetically | Naturally preserved |
| Palatability | Relies on synthetic flavour coatings | Natural flavour retained |
| Dispatch | Variable — often third-party fulfilment | Same day, direct from us |
Better ingredient quality, gentler cooking and faster delivery combine to produce food that your dog’s body can actually use — not just food that looks good on a label.
In practical terms, customers switching to our range commonly report improvements in coat condition and shine, more settled digestion and firmer stools, better energy levels and sustained vitality, and less food needed per meal as absorption improves.
These aren’t effects you get from a synthetic vitamin spray on over-processed kibble. They come from real nutrition that survives from ingredient to bowl.
Every recipe across our grain-free dog food range is made to the Freshlock™ standard — 25 complete recipes for every life stage and breed size, all with freshly prepared British meat or fish as ingredient #1, all gently cooked at 82°C, all dispatched the same day your order is placed.
Not sure where to start? Build your own sample box and try before you commit.
Freshly prepared means the meat or fish used in the recipe was in a fresh, raw state when it entered the manufacturing process — as opposed to being pre-dried into a meal or powder. It should appear as ingredient #1 on the label, meaning it makes up the largest proportion of the recipe by pre-cooking weight. If freshly prepared protein isn’t in position one, the claim carries less meaning.
Freshly prepared protein as the primary ingredient provides a higher quality amino acid profile and is generally more digestible than meal-based alternatives. Meal is produced by rendering and drying protein at high temperatures, which degrades its nutritional quality before it even reaches the cooking stage. Starting with fresh protein gives the manufacturing process a higher quality input to work with.
Raw dog food skips cooking entirely, which preserves nutrients but carries risks around bacteria and safe handling. Gentle cooking at 82°C eliminates those safety risks while retaining the vast majority of nutritional benefit — making it a safer alternative to raw with comparable nutritional quality for most dogs.
High-temperature cooking does degrade heat-sensitive nutrients significantly — particularly omega fatty acids, B vitamins and natural antioxidants. Gentle cooking at lower temperatures, like our Freshlock™ process at 82°C, preserves considerably more of these nutrients. The difference in cooking temperature is the primary reason Freshlock™ was developed.
6kg, 12kg and 15kg bags are dispatched the same day on orders placed before 12pm, with next day delivery. Smaller bags are dispatched the same day on a 2–3 day delivery window. We dispatch directly — no third-party warehousing — so the time between production and your dog’s bowl is kept as short as possible.