Dog Food Costs

If you found your way here via my dog food chart... bear with me. I have a lot to say about it. :)

But not a lot of time right this minute...

So here it is again with my commentary from the Facebook post, and I will elaborate and update (I was off on my Victor costs per bag by a couple bucks) this evening or tomorrow, so check back then!

This list is something I will build upon over time, and that I will adjust as I get new info. Please feel free to share, tag, ask questions and send suggestions for future versions... This isn't at all to judge-- not every dog will do well on every food-- it's just to provide some info. Many people think feeding a quality dog food needs to be expensive. But if you know where to look and HOW to look, you'll see it doesn't have to be. I plan to write in much greater detail tonight when I have the time. But here are a few take-aways.

Feeding higher quality food (and the right food for YOUR individual dog) can potentially save on long term health care costs; the poop factor cannot be stressed enough (so much smaller); less gas; fewer allergies; less doggie "smell"; more *quality* energy-- a healthier, happier dog.

The last 3 columns are where the data is all culminated-- everything before it is showing my work.  You can feed a 4-5 star food for pennies more per month than what VERY popular one star foods cost, and in fact for less than some of the 2.5-3 star foods. Feeding these foods to a 25-50lb dog will cost you dollars per YEAR. It's really not much at all over time, even though the up front cost looks bad.

These are simply representative samples, and some other flavors in the same lines will cost more or less. I used grain free and grain inclusive varieties. I tried to choose foods that are easy to find locally or online with free shipping. I used the NON-SALE prices for everything, and used the kcal/kg info from each company to calculate cups per bag. So you can see, there are likely ways of getting most of these cheaper.

As for the popular brands listed, I chose popular "mid-range" grocery store brands as well as what we've traditionally thought of as the "good stuff."

I also used the recommended daily amounts provided by each company, which are frankly notoriously high as a general rule of thumb.

And a word on recalls. Salmonella is FAR more scary for people than for animals, so honestly the salmonella itself doesn't scare me. I am more concerned by the way a company handles it. And the brands owned by huge companies are hard to really report on with regards to recalls since they are so huge...