Health

How to Properly Store Pet Food

Stacy Mantle 11 years ago

We spend hundreds of dollars on food for our pets. Yet, few of us think of the best way to store and preserve it when we buy in bulk. There is a right way and a wrong way to store pet food…

Over the past year, salmonella has become a common problem in both human and animal food. While the FDA recently declared a zero tolerance for salmonella in our pet food supply, contamination still occurs. Salmonella can be easily transferred to humans who handle or ingest (accidentally or intentionally) contaminated pet food. If you have kids, you must be particularly vigilant!

Wash pet food bowls after each use.

This is particularly important if you serve a raw food diet. You may want to consider using disposable pet food trays or easily cleaned dishes for your pets food. One such bowl is the Bamboo Feed + Toss Bowls. There are many other brands and types on the market that make feeding with a clean bowl easy to do.

Seal Food Between Uses

Dry food can be very difficult to lift and pour, but we found a handy gadget that is, coincidentally, called The Handy Camel. It is made of a clip (similar to potato bag clips, but a lot stronger and easier to use) that allows you to lift and seal bags of pet food (and other things like gardening soil, cat litter, charcoal, etc.)

The Handy Camel is a 12-inch bag clip with a specially designed hinge closure system that makes it capable of sealing large bags. The built-in handle allows you to use the Handy Camel to carry awkward bags with ease and no fear of tearing the sides with your fingers. The Handy Camel keeps your back protected and safe when lifting a heavy bag because, you no longer need to bend over to wrap your arms around or under the item you are trying to lift. The Handy Camel can also be adjusted on a bag to use it as a pouring handle.

Store Food Properly

Our personal preference for storing pet food is with the Gamma2 storage containers. We use the Gamma2 Select 50 for Pet Food Storage because it has wheels and is easy to clean underneath. It also helps keep food fresh and critters out of your food supply. The see-through containers let us view how low we’re getting on litter, food, or anything else. It comes in four sizes – 8 lb, 15 lb, 25 lb, and 50 lb. The containers are all airtight and easily opened or closed to keep food free of bugs or becoming stale.

Since we feed our dogs The Honest Kitchen, we like to transfer the food into the smaller container (we use the 15 lb) and that is eventually hydrated into nearly 50 lbs of food. We use the 8 lb container for treats and we use the 25 lb Stackable Vittles Vault for our dry cat food. All of them stack neatly and are easy to transfer. When we travel, we store our kibble in a Travel Trainer from Gamma2 which also unhooks into a couple of handy dishes.

Refrigerate promptly any unused wet or moist pet food. This includes treats, bones and raw foods. For optimum storage, your refrigerator should be set at 40 degrees.

To make your lives easier, we’ve created a handy graphic that is a great reminder of how to store food for both humans and pets: