Our roach chow is a mix of nutritious ingredients tested in our colonies over time. We only accept nutritious foods and ingredients proven to improve Dubia roach health and productivity. This is not a gut-load. It is an actual cockroach diet!
We like our roach chow so much we made it the cornerstone of our breeding program. And our roaches like it so much they’re glad we did! Having said that, we always recommend feeding Dubia roaches some fruits and vegetables. However, with our cockroach diet, you don’t absolutely have to! Whether your goal for your roaches is nutritious feeders or prolific breeders, Maximum Nutrition Everyday Roach Ration is nutritionally complete.
So whether you supplement their diet with fresh whole foods or not, the feeding instructions below will help you get the most from your roaches and their chow.
Table of Contents
We believe a well-formulated dry roach chow is the cornerstone of a Dubia roach breeding program for several reasons. While we believe in the power of fruits and vegetables, Dubia nymphs have a hard time packing in all the calories they’ll need for growth and reproduction on fruits and vegetables alone. Mating is resource intensive, and they will have to amass nutritional enough nutritional reserve now to fall back on when they are productive adults. They seem unable to do that with fresh foods alone.
In addition to caloric and nutritional density, dry roach food is also convenient, versatile, and safe relative to fresh foods. It doesn’t spoil easily, and instead of increasing the moisture in a roach colony, it tends to absorb it.
So let’s start there with the instructions…
1. Check the colony for problems
Before you begin, make sure your roaches are healthy and conditions are right for adding dry roach chow to their diet. Check for excess moisture in the enclosure. Look on walls, in frass, under objects like food bowls, and in egg crates or other objects made of permeable material that may absorb moisture. Roach enclosure heat and humidity can fluctuate wildly, so look for signs of previous moisture build-up like crusty, caked frass, mold or discoloration, the smell of ammonia, and brittle egg crates.
This is important. It’s an opportunity to survey the health of your colony. It’s good to get in the habit of checking things over at feeding time. Moisture is the big issue. For now, make sure there are no existing problems and get a sense of how “normal” looks.
With that done…
2. Address any issues you find
Fix any problems you find. Our article about Dubia roach die-off can tell you what those problems might be, and it will probably motivate you to develop good habits now in the beginning to avoid some of the problems we describe. We recommend checking it out below.
Related reading: Spotting problems in a Dubia roach colony »
When everything looks OK…
3. Feed your roaches
To start, give them enough food to last a few days. Serve it in a dish and not on the floor of the bin. Check daily for signs of moisture accumulation or food avoidance. This probably won’t happen in just a couple of days, but start here if you don’t already have a sense of the enclosure’s conditions. Be mindful of how the environment responds to dry food and how dry food responds to the environment. For example, if the food becomes wet and moldy before the roaches eat it you need to know that’s happening and fix it.
Dry food requires supplemental water, and there are various watering methods available for your roaches. Give that to them when you give them dry food.
We understand this may all sound somewhat tedious, but these things are important now not just to find and fix problems now, but so you get in the habit and it becomes second habit so that you keep it up without much thought. Chances are one day your roaches will have a problem, and scanning their environment for signs of trouble when you feed them may help you catch it and fix it early.
4. Add more as necessary
Increase the amount of roach chow you give your roaches at each feeding until you find an amount and a routine that works for you, or until you run into problems. Barring problems, how much and how often you feed the roaches is up to you. All things equal, every few days is probably OK. Your goal is to find a balance between too much food leading to spoilage or waste and too little food, leaving your roaches wanting for more.
And how do you know when there’s a problem? Easy. One sign is slower food consumption. While roaches tend to like decaying foods, and in many cases may even prefer it, decayed is different than bad, moldy, and rancid. Bacteria is not necessarily bad, but it can be. Spoilage and rancidity are bad news, so avoid them.
Foul smells are another sign of problems. Consider that roaches live and eat where they poop and die, and the strength and speed of pathogens are likely amplified by confined, heated, dark, moist spaces. This describes your roach bin, so be careful.
The bottom line is that roaches usually alert to problems with their food by slowing down or backing off entirely. If you see this, take it seriously. Throw out any uneaten food, then find and fix the problem. Then, start again with a fresh batch of roach chow.
Add fresh whole foods, if desired.
Assuming the conditions are right, you can grow and maintain a thriving colony of healthy, vigorous, nutritious Dubia Roaches on our dry food alone. This is what it’s designed for. However, roaches seem to do better with at least a little fresh food, and even a fair amount of it. This is as simple as feeding them a few over-ripe bananas that you would have otherwise thrown away, or that carrot you didn’t feel like finishing, or whatever. It’s up to you. We encourage you to experiment. Find some fresh foods your roaches like, avoid those they don’t, and keep an eye out for any of the issues mentioned above and in our Die-off article.
Give your roaches enough food, make sure what you give them is healthy, and assuming all their other needs are satisfied, your roaches should do very well.
Final thoughts
Feeding roaches is as simple or complicated as you make it. For most people, a diet based on roach chow is a probably the right choice. If you wish, you may supplement the diet with whole fruits and vegetables. Or, you could go wild and create elaborate concoctions with some combination of dry and fresh ingredients. Or, you may opt for something in-between or even nothing at all. With Maximum Nutrition Everyday Roach Ration, how far you go is up to you. That’s the point of it. And it allows you to avoid many problems that may come with relying on a whole food diet, or dry dog or cat food. That’s the point of it too.
So in summation, our dry roach chow meets and exceeds our roach’s need for intense nutritional support for either breeding or feeding. It reduces the risk of mold or bacterial growth compared to other food forms, and it’s convenient. We recommend adding fruits and vegetables when you can, but you don’t have to. Dry chow is the staple. How much you venture out from there is entirely up to you. This is by design. This is the purpose of our dry roach chow.
The next level
So these are the basics. Our roach chow contains ingredients your roaches need to grow big and strong. There’s no need to feed them anything else, but they’ll probably appreciate it if you do. And, they may even reward your efforts with gains in growth and nutrition. Try it and see! But be sure to follow these instructions closely to avoid common problems.
All this being said, there is actually another level. A “next-level”, if you will. Going next-level with roach chow is fairly simple, but there are some things to know, problems to watch out for, etc.
Read more: Tweaking roach chow for health nutrition »
