Our freezer currently holds a bag of peas, two ice cube trays, half a loaf of Caleb's mom's banana bread and a neat stack of flat, vacuum-sealed packs of cooked dog food. The packs arrived Saturday in an insulated box roughly the size of a microwave, and this morning, May 5, Hank got his first spoonful on top of his kibble.
He ate the whole bowl in what I'd estimate was eleven seconds, then licked it so long and so hard that he pushed it across the kitchen floor and pinned it against the radiator. Caleb, eating his own breakfast, said, "Well, he likes it." That much is settled. The rest is going to take a few months to figure out.
Why we're trying this
Fresh dog food subscriptions are everywhere right now, and people ask about them at the front desk all the time. I wanted to know what they're actually like to live with. I'm not naming the company we picked, because this isn't a review of one brand. It's a test of whether this kind of food makes sense for our dog and our budget.
Before I signed up, I asked our vet. Our vet has steered us away from grain-free boutique diets and raw feeding in the past, so I wanted a second opinion on this, too. The recipes we chose are cooked and include grains, and the answer was that a topper is fine as long as I trim his kibble a little so his total calories stay level. Hank is at 68 pounds, right where our vet wants him, and the goal is to keep him there. Your vet may see it differently for your dog, which is the whole reason to ask.
The real per-day price
Here's where it gets interesting. When you enter your dog's details on these sites, they first quote you a full diet, meaning fresh food only, no kibble. For Hank, a 68-pound adult, the full-diet quote came to $11.40 a day, or roughly $347 a month.
For comparison, Hank eats Purina Pro Plan Large Breed Adult. We buy the 34-pound bag on Chewy autoship, which takes 5 percent off the $74.99 list price, so we pay $71.24. A bag lasts him about 38 days. That's roughly $1.87 a day, or about $57 a month.
So feeding Hank fresh food alone would cost about six times what we spend now. That was never going to happen. What we signed up for instead is a topper plan: a smaller portion meant to go on top of his regular food. It costs $58 a month, or a little under $1.91 a day.
With his kibble scoop trimmed down slightly, our total daily food cost for Hank comes to about $3.50, up from $1.87. That's nearly double, for a spoonful on top. I went into this knowing that, and I logged the first $58 on the pet tab, the tab in our budget spreadsheet where every pet expense goes, with a note to look hard at it later.
Fridge, freezer and box logistics
Nobody mentions the logistics in the ads, so here they are:
- Freezer space. A month of topper packs took up about a third of our top freezer. We don't have a chest freezer, so the ice cream got demoted.
- Thawing. Each pack has to move from the freezer to the fridge about a day before we need it. I nearly forgot the very first one on Sunday night, before we'd even started, so there's now a sticky note on the fridge.
- Fridge space. An opened pack goes in a lidded container on the top shelf and lasts a few days. Caleb has been warned that it is not meatloaf.
- Packaging. The insulated liner and ice packs from one box filled half our recycling bin, and the liner isn't accepted curbside here. I'm still figuring out what to do with it.
- Delivery timing. The box needs to be brought inside within a few hours. On my workdays that means Caleb, or a neighbor.
The plan
We've committed to three months. That's enough boxes to notice whether anything changes for Hank (coat, energy, digestion, how fast he eats, whether he starts refusing plain kibble) and enough time for the novelty to wear off for both of us. After that, I'll sit down with the receipts and decide whether the extra $1.60-something a day is buying anything I can actually see.
For tonight, Hank is lying next to the fridge with his chin on his paws, staring at the freezer door like it's a squirrel.
