Wet food or kibble: what it really costs a month
By the kilo wet food costs half as much again as kibble; by the month it costs five times as much. The arithmetic on 8,900 products in the catalogue, for cats and for dogs.
“Wet food costs a bit more” is the line everybody repeats, and it holds as long as you only look at the shelf label. Look at what leaves your account in a month and the ratio changes completely. The reason is simple, and it has nothing to do with quality. It is water.
By the kilo the gap is half as much again
These are today's prices from the 8,940 packs of half a kilo and up, kibble and wet food for dogs and cats, in the catalogue and with a weight we know, brought back to the kilo.
| kibble | wet food | |
|---|---|---|
| cat, median | €10.01 | €14.68 |
| dog, median | €6.74 | €9.82 |
Forty-seven per cent more for a cat, forty-six for a dog: half as much again per kilo. It is a visible difference, but it is still the kind of gap you get between two brands.
Except you need four times as much of it
Kibble holds around 10% water, wet food around 75–80%. For the same nourishment you therefore need a great deal more of it: an adult 4 kg cat goes from roughly 60 g of dry food a day to roughly 220 g of wet.
That is why, between these two products, the price per kilo is not a comparison at all. It sets a kilo of kibble against a kilo that is three quarters water.
The real figure, by the month
Rations are indicative, for an adult animal at a healthy weight. The three bands are the cheapest 10%, the median and the dearest 10% of the catalogue.
Adult cat, 4 kg
| band | kibble | wet food | ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| cheap | €9 | €48 | 5.3 times |
| median | €18 | €97 | 5.4 times |
| premium | €32 | €159 | 5.0 times |
Adult dog, 15 kg
| band | kibble | wet food | ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| cheap | €28 | €112 | 4.0 times |
| median | €51 | €265 | 5.2 times |
| premium | €105 | €526 | 5.0 times |
The ratio stays around five times in every price band and for both animals. This is not an effect of expensive brands. It is the water.
What these numbers do not say
Here ends what the prices can show, and begins what they cannot.
- We are not saying wet food is not worth it. Vets often recommend it to get more water into an animal that drinks little, and that is an argument about health, not about price. We do not hold health data and we do not invent it.
- We are not saying the two are equivalent. We compare the cost of an indicative daily ration, not the composition or the quality of the ingredients.
- The rations are indicative. Real need changes with age, activity, neutering and condition. The exact amounts are on the pack of the product you buy.
The middle way almost everybody takes
In practice many people use kibble as the base and wet food as part of the meal. The arithmetic scales: if wet food covers a quarter of the daily ration, the monthly spend roughly doubles against dry alone, instead of going up fivefold.
Before you change type, look at the band
The numbers above say one thing that holds for both: between the cheap band and the premium band there is more than a factor of three, inside the same category. Choosing well within dry food is often worth more than moving to wet — and above all, checking whether the very same bag costs less at another shop.