At the park a few weeks ago, I was loudly admiring my neighbor’s dog. Badu is a reddish-brown Pit Bull with the shiny, glossy coat of an Olympic dressage horse, and the generous musculature of a Marvel star. I asked my neighbor how he kept Badu in such great shape. “I only give him fresh food,” my neighbor said as he threw a tennis ball and Badu sprinted away after it, a blur of mahogany across the lawn.
He went on to describe the lengthy lists of groceries and recipes he had for Badu. I nodded admiringly, knowing that I wasn’t quite ready to spend several hours a week meal-prepping for my own dog. Fortunately, for those of us who aren’t full-time pet chefs, there are a number of subscription meal boxes out there that provide fresh, whole food for your dog, delivered straight to your door. Below, some of our favorites.
Btw, our editors (and their pets) picked out these products. They’re always in stock at the time we publish, but there’s a chance they’ll sell out. If you do buy through our links, we may earn a commission. (We’ve got a lot of toys to buy over here, you know?)
The Farmer’s Dog was founded in 2014, after founder Brett Podolsky’s dog, Jada, started having digestive issues. According to Podolsky, he started preparing Jada’s food himself with fresh ingredients, and her digestive issues cleared up almost immediately. He paired up with a friend, Jonathan Regev, and the two worked with veterinary nutritionists to “build the company they wished existed for their own dogs.” All of the food is human-grade and cooked at low temperatures.
Plans start at $2 a day with free shipping, but the price goes up from there depending on the size, activity level, and caloric needs of your dog. (The weekly price estimate for my own small dog, Cleo, was $28.54.) There are four available recipes — beef, chicken, turkey, and pork — all of which come in eco-friendly, biodegradable packaging. Once you’ve signed up, you can easily sign into your account and adjust the portion sizes and frequency of delivery to best suit you and your pup’s needs.
Ollie meals are made with hormone-free meat and cooked in small batches at low temperatures at a facility in New Jersey. They offer five recipes: beef with sweet potatoes, chicken with carrots, lamb with cranberries, turkey with blueberries, and pork with apples. After completing a quiz about your dog’s breed, weight, activity level, and any allergies they have, you get a proposed meal plan for your pup. The fresh plan starts at $1.57 per meal, and the average cost is about $8 per day, depending on the size of your dog. (Cleo’s price estimate was $37/week).
Once you sign up, you get a starter pack that includes your personalized food packs, as well as a detailed feeding guide to help your dog adjust to their new diet, a scoop to help portion out the food, and a “puptainer” to store food after it has been opened. The meals that arrive can stay in the freezer for up to six months, and once they’re thawed can be refrigerated for four days. (Fresh food has a shorter shelf life.)
Nom Nom has two board-certified veterinary nutritionists on staff and is committed to sustainability. Whenever possible, they make sure their ingredients are sustainably sourced, and they are working to ensure zero food waste in their facilities. Their meals a pre-portioned down to the calorie, so that you can simply unpack each meal from its recyclable meal pack and not worry about figuring out how to spoon out the correct amount.
After you take a quiz about your dog’s specific needs, you can choose between their four recipes: beef mash, chicken cuisine, pork potluck, or turkey fare, and they set up a personalized plan. The cost was comparable to other meal kits. (Cleo’s price estimate was $34.02/week.) If your dog loves it, Nom Nom also offers meal kits for cats. And for $90, they also provide a gut health kit so that you can get a deeper understanding of your pet’s microbiome and health needs.
PetPlate prides itself on its vet-developed, high-quality, human-grade, whole-food ingredients: “no different from what you would feed the rest of your family.” Like many of the other pet meal subscription services, you take a quiz to determine your pet’s exact needs, and then PetPlate comes up with a plan that works best for you. What sets PetPlate apart is that it has one of the widest selections of recipes. There’s Barkin’ Beef, Chompin’ Chicken, Tail Waggin’ Turkey, Lip Lickin’ Lamb, Power Packed Pork, Lean & Mean Venison, Roost Rulin’ Chicken, and Trail Blazin’ Beef.
There is the Full Plan, which is a complete eating plan that meets 100 percent of your pet’s caloric needs, as well as the Topper Plan, which is cheaper and provides 25 percent of your pet’s caloric needs. You can use this in conjunction with the regular food you’re feeding your dog already, either as a way to ease them into a fresh food diet, or as a more cost-effective way to supplement their diet with more fresh ingredients. (For Cleo, the Full Plan was $33.95/week, and the Topper Plan was $21.31 per week.)
Like other similar services, Spot & Tango offers personalized meal plans tailored to your dog’s needs. Unlike other services, though, the company offers both fresh food meals (in three flavors — turkey and red quinoa, beef and millet, and lamb and brown rice), as well as their signature product called UnKibble. According to the company, Unkibble is the best of both fresh food and dry food: the “only Fresh Dry food for dogs” is kibble-shaped and cheaper than most fresh frozen options, but made with only fresh, whole ingredients.
It comes with a customized serving scoop so you can easily measure out the perfect portion for your dog, and it can be stored in the pantry, freeing up valuable fridge real estate for you. Overall, the company offers lots of flexibility. Between shipments, you can adjust the recipes, portion sizes, and frequency of your food deliveries, and if you choose the fresh food plan, it offers both a full plan as well as a cheaper topper plan. (For Cleo, the regular full food plan was $36.24/week, the fresh food topper plan was $20.74/week, and the Unkibble plan was $18.27/week.)
Founded by Ruth and Javier Marriott (pet parents to Lola Marie Marriott), A Pup Above is committed to making sustainable, human-grade food for dogs. You can choose from their selection of dry food, fresh food, or a combination of both, and mix and match their beef, pork, turkey, and chicken recipes. A sampler pack of four seven-pound bags of fresh food will set you back $151.96.
All of A Pup Above’s packaging is 100 percent recyclable, and by using a slow, sous-vide cooking method on their food instead of cooking them over high heat, the ingredients retain more of their vitamins, nutrients, and proteins. The company is also committed to transparency, and if you put in the lot number of your dog’s food, you can get a full report of which farms every ingredient came from. You can also feel good about your purchase, because A Pup Above donates one percent of their revenue to the White Buffalo Land Trustopens in a new tab, a center for regenerative agriculture in California.
Madeleine Aggeler is a freelance journalist and copywriter in Washington, D.C. Previously, she was a writer at New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives with her dog, Cleo, who works primarily as a foot warmer.
