Dog Food Comparisons

Comparisons here are settled with the corpus rather than with adjectives. The unit is cost per 1,000 kcal, because that is the only price basis that survives different bag sizes and wildly different moisture levels — a fresh food and a kibble cannot be compared per pound in any way that means anything.

The number every comparison here starts from

Form decides more about what a food costs to feed than brand does, and the gap is not small. Across our verified dog corpus, the median wet food costs 5.6× more per 1,000 kcal than the median dry food. Per-pound prices hide this completely, because a wet food is roughly three-quarters water.

Median values by form, verified dog foods.
FormFoodsPricedCost / 1,000 kcalProtein (DM)Est. carbs (DM)
Dry 650 328 $1.96 28.9% 40%
Wet 429 215 $11.00 40.9% 16%
Fresh 20 0 Not yet priced 34.5% 10%
Air-dried 7 0 Not yet priced 41.2% 21%

Medians, not averages — a handful of very expensive small-bag products would drag a mean badly. Unpriced foods are excluded from the cost column but counted in the total.

Articles

Comparing individual foods instead? Every product page carries the same computed figures, and the full index lets you line them up by form.