Roach Chow Tweaks: Enhancing Nutrition

This post covers roach chow tweaks that enhance nutrition and help grow and maintain strong, productive, nutritionally strong Dubia roaches.

Dry roach chow is a popular choice among Dubia roachkeepers. A well-formulated roach chow is healthy for roaches, convenient to use and store, and low risk with respect to potential health issues. You can also use it as a stand-in for gut load, at least temporarily, if the quality is high enough. For these reasons, dry roach chow is often a cornerstone of the Dubia roach diet.

But is it maximized? After all, Dubia roaches do best with a diet of dry chow and fresh whole foods. This suggests that at least some nutrients Dubia roaches need aren’t supplied by roach chow alone. Could this be true? We want maximum growth and productivity, and don’t want to shortchange our roaches or ourselves. We want the healthiest, fastest-growing, most productive roaches possible. Can anything be done to enhance the effectiveness of dry roach chow?

The answer is yes! We’ve learned some nutrition-enhancing roach chow tweaks on our Dubia roach breeding journey. While these are anecdotes and not science, we’re convinced enough by what we see to use these roach chow tweaks ourselves. We’re always open to change if we discover better information, but currently, this is state-of-the-art.

With this in mind, we created this guide to help you take your roach health to the next level.

What is “next level”?

Consider that we have ridiculously high standards for Dubia roach health and diet. While roaches can survive on a diet of almost anything, we want “next-level” health for our Dubia breeders and feeders. When we test diets on our roaches, we look for any marginal increase in productivity. This is our gold standard. And we do mean any increase. Our definition of the perfect Dubia roach diet is one where nothing must be added to improve productivity. This is a high standard indeed.

So what should you do if you want next-level health for your roaches? First, get yourself some dry chow and settle into a routine. Read our roach chow feeding instructions for guidance on the basics. This is the base from which you will operate and expand.

What do you want from your roach chow tweaks?

Ask yourself this question: Is my primary goal to improve the health of my roaches or the animals that feed on them? While not mutually exclusive, there is a broader point here that we need to address. We can improve the health of Dubia roaches directly and specifically. However, we can only influence the health of the animals that feed on them indirectly and generally. Reptiles, amphibians, arachnids, and other insectivores have different dietary needs and concerns, which we can’t address here because we’re focusing on roach chow tweaks. This would be an issue of gut loading. If interested, you can read more about gut loading in the following post:

Related reading: How and why to gut load Dubia roaches »

Now, to boost nutrition to improve the health of your roaches, read on…

Experimentation is key

On a basic level, tweaking roach chow involves adding something to it. The trick is determining what to add and how much of it to add.

To that end, start by experimenting. Search for foods and ingredients that work for you and your roaches. This involves trying different foods in various combinations, observing the results, and then making adjustments. Simple.

You can start with something as basic as fruits or vegetables tossed in with the roaches. You can do this in addition to the dry roach chow or separate from it. Whatever works for you, whenever it works for you, and with any fruit or vegetable your roaches like. Overripe fruits such as bananas and apples are usually winners, as are sweet potatoes, beets, carrots, and squash. The first rule of roach chow tweaking is “If it’s healthy and your roaches like it, do it.”

The second rule is “Don’t overdo it”. Don’t feed so much fruit or vegetables that your roaches stop eating the roach chow. This can be addressed by combining ingredients as outlined below. Only provide as much chow as the roaches can eat in a short time. This is to minimize moisture build-up in the colony and food rot, which helps avoid problems that could affect the health of your roaches.

So far, we’ve presented a basic version of food experimentation. This may be something you’ve already done. Many roach keepers throw fruit or vegetables into their roach colonies on occasion — perhaps when they can or on a schedule. While this is all well and good, and we recommend it as a start, it is just a start. It doesn’t really rise to the next level of roach chow tweaking. This requires a bit more effort. It requires changing the roach chow itself to alter its nutritional profile. This is where the “next level” begins.

Add water

The first step in roach chow tweaking is to combine it with water. While simple, our roaches like this a lot, and yours probably will too. Roaches tend to eat more when chow is presented in this way. Wet chow provides the following benefits:

First, it helps meet the roach’s moisture needs more naturally. Water crystals function OK, but they provide only moisture and a “gel” with zero calories. This is a wasted opportunity as far as we’re concerned. Why not supply moisture and nutrition at the same time? That is, after all, how it works in the wild. The “natural” Dubia roach diet certainly contains more moisture than what’s found in dry roach chow. These roaches originate from the rainforest, so the foods they eat are likely not dry at all. On the contrary, they are probably rich in moisture.

Second, adding moisture to dry roach chow makes it “easier” to eat. Roaches have little trouble breaking down hard foods, but many people report that roaches generally eat more when their chow is blended finely rather than offered to them in large chunks. This is our experience as well. We acknowledge again that this is anecdotal, but we think it’s real.

Mixing dry roach chow and water is simple and easy. Just pour a bit of dry chow in a bowl, add water, then let it sit until the water is absorbed. Hot water will absorb faster. Add water or chow as needed until you achieve the desired consistency. We aim for something similar to thick oatmeal, but you can make it however you like. If your roaches are dehydrated, for example, you can add more water to the mix. You can see what that looks like in our Dubia roach food diary post. Be creative. FYI: Our primary concern with adding water to roach chow is avoiding a wet mess in the roach bin. We balance our desire to provide our roaches with additional moisture via food with our aversion to cleaning wet, moldy roach bins.

Add juice

True tropical cockroaches like Hissers from Madagascar are more productive when they eat fruit. We don’t know if it’s the sugar or something else, but they do seem to like it. And a good appetite is great for Dubia roaches. We recommend adding anything that increases their enthusiasm for food — within reason, of course. Juice will do that.

To add juice to your roach chow, substitute juice for water in the instructions above. That’s all there is to it. Choose organic juices if you can. Pesticides may be concentrated in juice. Fruits like apples and oranges are among the most heavily sprayed. You could even make your own by mashing or blending whole apples or oranges, adding enough roach chow to make a paste, and then feeding that to your roaches. More on this in the next section.

NOTE: Be careful if you plan to feed these roaches off within the next few days. Too much citrus can cause digestive problems in fragile reptiles and possibly other animals. Dubia roaches like citrus fruits, but many animals that eat them do not.

Add vegetables or fruit

Consider adding chopped raw vegetables such as carrots, kale, collards, or beets along with the water. You can also add freshly chopped, blended, or pureed fruit. Finely-chopped apple, mushed-up orange or banana, and just about any fruit you may have will do. Our roach chow contains some sugar, but Dubia roaches love sweets, so you can add a bit more in the form of fruit or fruit juice. Adding these even in small amounts can prompt your roaches to eat their chow with extra vigor. Carrots, beets, and sweet potatoes all contain sugar, and it’s not always necessary to go for the sweetest fruit you can find. Remember that experimentation is key. Learn what your roaches like, and then find creative ways to provide it.

As an aside, we don’t often add fruit to our roach chow because it’s just as easy to feed it separately. We prefer adding juice instead of chopped fruit because it doesn’t seem to go bad as quickly. However, we sometimes mix blended carrots, beets, and other fresh vegetables with our roach chow. This increases the chow’s palatability, and the roaches eat it up. They love it! Happy roaches make for happy roach-keepers.

Add other dry ingredients

We formulate our roach chow to be as nutritionally complete as possible. Honestly, the purpose of our roach chow tweaks is so that you don’t have to. However, we always encourage experimentation. You can add any ingredient you like. Did you read that cracked wheat acts like Miracle-Gro for Dubia roaches? (it doesn’t, but let’s say it might…) No problem! Grab some cracked wheat and add it to the roach chow. There is no end to the potential for experimentation.

NOTE: Because roach colonies typically contain roaches at every stage of development, and roaches at different stages have unique nutritional needs, we purposely leave some ingredients in our roach chow coarse rather than finely blended. This allows roaches to eat preferentially, meaning they select what they eat based on their current nutritional needs.

Science has shown that they are actually very good at this. For this reason, we recommend that you not grind added ingredients too finely. We also suggest not going overboard with protein. Evidence suggests that the health of cockroaches — including Dubia roaches — is negatively affected by too much protein. A reasonable solution is to keep dry ingredients coarse so the roaches can choose whether or not they eat them.

Related reading: Dubia roaches and issues with dietary protein »

This means adding water or juice to dry chow may create an issue. Roaches have difficulty eating preferentially when the ingredients are wet and combined in a mush. This is why we serve wet roach chow to our roaches less often than we otherwise would. And when we do, we also offer dry chow on the side. It’s something to consider. This isn’t necessary, but it’s an option if you’re interested.

In conclusion…

You don’t need to go as far as we do to raise nutritious, productive roaches, but you can. We make the extra effort with our dry chow modifications to avoid problems and to maintain high productivity. It’s worth mentioning again that our standards are very high. We acknowledge this and don’t expect most people to care as much about roach health and nutrition as we do. However, we think you and your roaches can benefit from the fact that we do!

Have a question?

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