Short answer: most dog treats are made in five steps — ingredients are selected, mixed or formulated, shaped, cooked (baked, smoked, or slow air-dried), then cooled, packaged, and tested for safety. The big difference between a good treat and a bad one isn't the machinery. It's how many ingredients go in before the cooking starts. A single-ingredient chew like a bully stick is trimmed, cleaned, and dried — that's it. A shaped biscuit or a rawhide chew can involve a dozen ingredients, binders, and chemical processing steps.
I'm Preston Smith, co-founder of Bully Sticks Central. We make single-ingredient chews, so I've spent a lot of time in the part of this process most people never see. Here's how it actually works.
What are the steps in making dog treats?
1. Ingredient selection
Everything downstream is decided here. Manufacturers of formulated treats source meats, grains, fats, binders, humectants (to keep treats soft), and often preservatives and palatants. Single-ingredient makers source one thing. Ours comes from grass-fed American and Argentinean farms, ethically sourced, and it's 100% real meat — no chemicals or artificial ingredients. If you want the full breakdown of why that matters, we wrote it up in our guide to single-ingredient chews.
2. Mixing and formulating
This step only exists for multi-ingredient treats. The mix is blended to a target recipe — protein, moisture, fat, and often added vitamins and minerals. This is also where binders and preservatives get introduced, because a formulated treat has to hold its shape and survive months on a shelf.
Single-ingredient chews skip this entirely. Nothing to mix when there's only one ingredient.
3. Shaping and cutting
Formulated treats get extruded, rolled, or stamped into shapes — biscuits, kibble-sized bites, sticks. Natural chews get cut and trimmed to length instead. A 6-inch bully stick and a 12-inch bully stick come off the same raw material; the difference is where it gets cut.
4. Cooking, smoking, or drying
This is the step that makes a treat safe to eat. Heat or dehydration kills pathogens and drops the moisture content low enough that bacteria can't grow. The three common methods:
- Baking — fast, high heat. Standard for biscuits.
- Smoking — heat plus smoke, used on bones and some meat chews.
- Air-drying / dehydrating — low heat over a long stretch of time. This is how bully sticks, tendons, cow ears, and tracheas are made. It's slow, but it doesn't require adding anything to preserve the product afterward.
The FDA has published guidance on treat-related risks, and drying to a proper moisture level is a core part of why properly made natural chews are safe.
5. Cooling, packaging, and quality control
Treats cool to their final texture, then get packaged. Reputable manufacturers pull samples for microbiological testing (salmonella is the usual concern) and verify the nutritional panel. Any maker who can't tell you what testing they run is a maker to skip.
How are natural chews made differently?
Here's the honest version. A bully stick is a dried bull pizzle. It gets cleaned, trimmed, sometimes braided, then slow-dried for hours until the moisture is gone. Nothing is added. Nothing is sprayed on. What comes out the other end is 100% natural, fully digestible, and 100% real meat.
That "fully digestible" part is the piece that matters most, and it's where rawhide falls down. Rawhide is made from the inner hide layer of cattle — a byproduct of the leather industry — and it's often processed with chemicals to clean and whiten it. It doesn't break down in a dog's stomach the way a meat-based chew does, which is why it's a known choking and obstruction risk. The American Kennel Club and VCA Animal Hospitals both cover this in detail. None of our treats are made from animal hide. No rawhide, ever.
What should I look at on the label?
Three things, in order:
- Ingredient count. One is best. If the list runs long, read all of it.
- Country of origin. Not just where it was packaged — where the meat came from.
- Preservatives and additives. A properly dried chew doesn't need them.
If you're picking for a young dog, sizing and supervision matter more than anything on the label — we covered that in our post on bully sticks for puppies.
Can I make dog treats at home?
You can, and plenty of people do. Baked treats from chicken, sweet potato, or plain peanut butter are straightforward — just check that any peanut butter you use is xylitol-free, since xylitol is toxic to dogs (the ASPCA has details).
What you can't easily do at home is the slow-drying process behind natural chews. That takes commercial dehydration equipment running for hours at controlled temperatures, and getting the moisture level wrong is exactly how you end up with a spoiled product. That's the part worth buying rather than DIY-ing.
The bottom line
Dog treats are made through selection, mixing, shaping, cooking, and packaging — but the number of ingredients that enter at step one tells you most of what you need to know about what comes out at step five. Fewer steps, fewer ingredients, better chew.
Everything we make is single-ingredient, 100% natural, fully digestible, no rawhide, ethically sourced from grass-fed American and Argentinean farms, and 100% high-quality guaranteed. Take a look at our full lineup of natural chews — and if a chew ever doesn't measure up, tell us. We want to know.
This post was last updated at July 17, 2026 16:37
