What Your Dog's Food Actually Costs Per Day

Dog food is sold in bags. Dogs eat in grams.

That gap is where most of the confusion about cost lives. A 10 kg bag has a number printed on it, and that number feels like the price. It isn't. It's the price of three weeks or so, paid in one go.

The only figure that tells you anything useful is what one day in the bowl costs.

It's two numbers.

What the food costs per gram, and how many grams your dog eats in a day. Multiply them. Veterinary nutritionists give owners the same advice: work out the cost per calorie or the cost per day, because your dog will need different amounts of different foods.

Take Sport, a healthy, active five-year-old Labrador at around 35 kg. His owner buys a 10 kg bag of good kibble for ₹6,900. That's ₹0.69 a gram. Prices vary a lot by brand and by where you shop, so treat that bag as an example and put your own number in.

Now, how much of it does Sport eat? A 35 kg dog needs somewhere around 1,600 to 1,800 kcal a day, and adult dry foods tend to run about 3,500 to 3,700 kcal a kilo, so that's roughly 430 g to 510 g a day. Call it 470 g. The bag lasts him about three weeks.

₹324 a day, in a range of about ₹300 to ₹350.

Now run the same sum on us. Our feeding chart puts a healthy adult of Sport's size at roughly 1,220 g a day of Chicken and Rice, split across two meals. Chicken and Rice is ₹0.40 a gram, GST included.

₹488 a day.

Against that ₹690 a kilogram kibble, we're about ₹164 a day more, or roughly ₹5,000 a month. That kibble is mid-range, not the cheap end of the market; budget kibble runs well below it. For a 35 kg dog on Chicken and Rice against mid-range dry food, we cost more.

You may have seen fresh food compared to kibble in a way that comes out level, or even cheaper. Before you decide, check two things: the portion of fresh food shown in the comparison, and which kibble is in the comparison. Ours is the portion from our own chart, the one we would send a 35 kg Labrador. With realistic portions we cost more than budget and mid-range kibble, though the gap narrows for dearer brands.

There's a reason the gram counts look so different, and it isn't that fresh food is thin.

Kibble is roughly 90% dry. Dry pet foods hold only about 3% to 11% water. Ours is cooked and then chilled rather than dried hard, so the water stays in it. In a 2024 feeding trial, a fresh cooked food came out at about 31% dry matter against about 93% for the kibble it was tested beside, and the dogs ate a little over twice as much of the fresh food by weight.

So the multiple is roughly two to three times, not four or five. You are not feeding your dog three times the food. You're feeding food that still has its water in it.

That's also why comparing a 200 g pouch to 200 g of kibble tells you nothing at all. To compare two foods honestly you have to put them on the same moisture footing first.

Chicken and Rice, healthy adult, at ₹400 per kg:

That table is a starting point, not a rule, and so is the chart on any bag of kibble. Any daily feeding figure is an estimate that has to be adjusted by watching the dog. Individual dogs can need as much as 30% more or less than a calculated amount, and some references put the spread wider still. Age, activity, body condition and whether your dog is neutered all move it; one meta-analysis put neutered dogs about a quarter below intact ones on energy needs. We adjust with you over the first few weeks.

Worth noticing too that the gap between us and kibble isn't fixed. In rupees a day it grows with the dog. A 5 kg indie or a Shih Tzu eats about ₹114 a day of our chicken, against roughly ₹70 a day of that same kibble, so the difference there is nearer ₹45 a day than ₹165.

Against a mid-range kibble at ₹690 a kilogram, we run about half again as dear for a 35 kg dog and about 1.6 times as dear for a small dog; the gap is similar across dog sizes. Against dearer kibble the gap narrows.

Price per kilogram assumes equal energy density. Fresh cooked food sits at roughly 1,300 calories per kilogram; kibble runs 3,500 to 4,000. More expensive kibbles are often denser, so your dog eats fewer grams daily. A price-per-kilogram comparison misses this.

A clearer measure is cost per 1,000 calories fed. Our Chicken and Rice runs about ₹300 per 1,000 calories. Economy kibble ₹30 to ₹60, mid-range ₹55 to ₹120, premium ₹105 to ₹270, imported super-premium ₹230 to ₹540. We sit in the super-premium band.

Our other recipes are priced differently per gram, so the daily figure moves with the recipe too. Ask us and we'll do the sum for your dog before you order anything.

Nothing we can promise you in medical terms, and we won't try.

What we can describe is the food. It's cooked in small batches and delivered twice a week. It has no preservatives, which is exactly why it lives in your fridge and gets eaten within days. The recipes are formulated with our canine nutritionist. When we say chicken, you can see the chicken.

Customers do tell us things after switching. Better stools, more interest at mealtimes, a coat that looks glossier. We pass that on as what people tell us, not as a result we can guarantee, and certainly not as treatment.

The one part of that with a controlled study behind it is stool volume. In the 2024 trial mentioned above, dogs on a fresh cooked chicken and rice food passed about 55 g of stool a day against about 90 g on the kibble they were compared with, and digested a few percentage points more of what they ate. Stool consistency scored identically on the two foods, so "firmer" isn't what that study found. It's also one study, on two products, neither of them ours, and the dogs on the fresh food were eating slightly under their requirement, which flatters the stool figure.

If something is wrong with your dog, that conversation belongs with your vet.

For a lot of owners the honest summary is this: for a big dog our food costs more per day than budget and mid-range kibble. Against premium and imported kibbles the gap narrows. How much more or less depends on which kibble you're feeding now.

If you're feeding a decent kibble and your dog is thriving, good weight, good coat, good energy, clean bloodwork, you don't have a problem to solve. Kibble is cheap, it keeps, it travels, and it holds a lot of dogs in good shape.

Budget is a legitimate reason to stay with it. So is a very large dog and a fixed monthly number. We'd rather you fed a good kibble consistently than fed fresh for six weeks and then stopped.

What we'd push back on is the assumption that fresh is only for people with money to burn. Look at the daily figure for your dog's actual weight before you decide. For a small dog it is often less than people expect, and plenty of owners feed us for one meal and kibble for the other, which lands the cost somewhere in between.

Do the sum on your current food. Divide what you pay by the grams in the bag, multiply by what your dog eats in a day, and you'll have a number you can compare to the table above. It takes a minute and it's the only comparison that's fair.

Then, if you want us to run it for your dog, WhatsApp us to start. Send the breed, the weight and the age, and we'll send back the portion and the daily cost with nothing hidden in it.

Weekly plans currently carry 10% off for the first three months, and monthly plans 20% off for the first full year. Those are introductory, and they don't change the underlying maths, so we'd rather you looked at the list price and decided on that.

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