Fresh food for dogs: what it really costs a month
What gently cooked fresh food costs against kibble, using real prices from our catalogue and Dogfy Diet's own list, size by size.
Fresh food for dogs — cooked at low temperature and delivered in daily portions — is almost always talked about in terms of quality, and almost never in terms of price. This page does the opposite: it puts the monthly costs side by side, using the real kibble prices you will find in our catalogue and Dogfy Diet's public price list.
What kibble actually costs
These are not list prices. They are the prices that come out today of the 2,742 bags of dog kibble of 2 kg and up in our catalogue, brought back to the kilo.
| band | price per kilo |
|---|---|
| cheap (the cheapest 10%) | €3.56 |
| market median | €6.32 |
| premium (the dearest 10%) | €11.34 |
Between the cheapest kibble and the premium kibble there is more than a factor of three. That is why “kibble costs less than fresh food” is a sentence that, on its own, means nothing: it depends which kibble.
The monthly comparison, size by size
The amounts are the indicative ones for an adult dog at a healthy weight: 120 g a day for a 5 kg dog, 250 g for a 15 kg dog, 400 g for a 30 kg dog. For Dogfy Diet we use the full list price, not a promotional one.
| dog | median kibble | premium kibble | Dogfy Diet |
|---|---|---|---|
| small, 5 kg | €23 | €41 | €62 |
| medium, 15 kg | €47 | €85 | €92 |
| large, 30 kg | €76 | €136 | €132 |
The thing the numbers say and the slogans do not
Look at the last row. For a large dog already eating premium kibble, fresh food today costs four euros a month less. That is not a saving to build a decision on — four euros in a hundred and thirty is noise, and next month the comparison may turn the other way — but it does say that for that dog the two choices cost the same.
The gap is enormous, instead, for a small dog on cheap kibble: €23 against €62, nearly three times as much.
So the question “is fresh food worth it?” has opposite answers depending on the dog and on what it eats now. Someone with a large dog who already buys expensive food is looking at a choice that costs about the same. Someone with a small dog who spends little is looking at tripling the budget.
What changes besides the price
Here we leave the numbers we can check, so we say it carefully.
- Storage. Fresh food arrives frozen and lives in the freezer, with the day's portion thawed in advance. It needs room, and it needs remembering the night before.
- The weight of water. Kibble holds around 10% moisture, gently cooked fresh food around 70%. Grams per day are therefore not comparable between the two: the sensible comparison is the monthly cost, which is the one above.
- Subscription. Fresh food is bought by the month, not by the bag. It can be paused and cancelled, but it is a recurring commitment rather than a purchase when the bag runs out.
- Health claims. Makers of fresh food quote surveys of their own customers about coat, digestion and stools. Those are figures they collected among people who had already chosen the product, so they are not comparable with an independent study. We do not report them as facts.
If you want to try it
Dogfy Diet is the fresh food service whose prices we have checked. It builds a plan around the dog's weight and age, delivers frozen daily portions, and offers a 14-day trial box, so you can find out whether the dog will eat it before committing to a whole month.
See the prices and try 14 days of Dogfy Diet
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And if you stay with kibble
The comparison above says the real difference is made by the band of kibble, not by moving to fresh food. If you are spending €10 a kilo, it is worth checking whether the same bag costs less elsewhere before changing category: that is exactly what this site is for.