This guide is part of our ongoing journal, practical writing on how nutrition, breed and lifestyle shape canine health. Use the table of contents to jump to a section, or read straight through.
The short answer: the price on the bag tells you almost nothing about what feeding your dog actually costs. Cost per day is the only fair measure, because a denser food is fed in smaller amounts, and a food full of water is fed in large ones.
- Compare cost per day, not price per kilo.
- Denser foods are fed in smaller portions.
- Fresh food costs more partly because you pay for water and cold storage.
- The cheapest bag is rarely the cheapest bowl.
Why price per kilo misleads
A cheap kilo of food is not cheap if your dog has to eat a lot of it, and a pricier kilo is not expensive if the daily portion is small. Two foods at very different shelf prices can land much closer once you work out how much of each you actually feed per day.
What drives cost per day
Two things: how calorie-dense the food is, and therefore how much you feed, and how much of the product is water. Kibble and air-dried are dry, so you feed less by weight. Fresh and wet foods are mostly moisture, so the daily portion is larger and you are partly paying to ship and chill water.
Rough ranges to expect
As a guide for a medium dog, a complete air-dried diet works out around the low end of a couple of pounds a day, while fresh, gently-cooked subscription food typically runs higher, often in the region of several pounds a day, because of the water weight and cold chain. Budget kibble can be cheaper still per day, with the trade-offs covered in air-dried versus kibble. Treat these as starting points and check current prices, because they move.
How to compare honestly
Take any food, find its calories per 100 g, work out your dog's daily portion from that, then multiply by the price per gram. Do that for each option and you are comparing bowls, not bags. Our feeding calculator does this for SMPL automatically.
SMPL is not the cheapest bag on the shelf, and we would not claim it is. The honest case is on cost per day and what you get for it: a dense, minimally processed, single-protein food where the daily portion is small. Run the numbers on a bowl-for-bowl basis and the gap is usually smaller than the shelf price suggests.
