One of the questions I get asked when I mention making raw food for my cats is, “Wow, isn’t that expensive?” When I posted about how I make raw cat food for Newton and Ashton, APB asked this much more politely, “Have you figured out what your food costs, per pound?” in the post comments.
The short answers are: it’s actually not expensive at all, and the food cost per pound varies a little depending on your ingredient cost. I sat down with the actual receipts from the last batch of food that you saw photos of my making to calculate the exact cost. Surprisingly, it costs much more to feed Pierre, who is not interested in raw food thankyouverymuch, than it does to feed raw to both Newton and Ashton combined.
How Much Raw Cat Food Costs to Make
I’m about to start tossing numbers around again, so if you are as allergic to math as I am, don’t worry, I’ll include the bottom line and not just all these numbers.
The 30 lb batch of food I described in my previous post had a total ingredient cost of $68.67.
That total includes buying the chicken, chicken liver, and eggs at Whole Foods, so I’m sure I could have sourced them less expensively. I wanted to be sure the chicken wasn’t injected with extra saline or dunked in a chlorinated water bath, so I chose to buy the chicken at Whole Foods where I knew I could get air chilled chicken. I am still looking into other sources, so I might be able to get that cost down a little bit.
The 30 lb of food in a batch are separated out into 202 meals. (Ashton eats 2 oz meals and Newton eats 2.75 oz meals, for an average of 2.38 oz.)
Taking the total cost of a batch and dividing it by the number of meals, that last batch of raw food I made for the cats cost $.34 per meal. Yes, you read that right, my cats are eating whole meat meals from Whole Foods at $.34 per serving.
Pierre, who still turns his nose up at raw, currently eats the canned food that Ashton and Newton used to also eat, which costs $1.70 per can. (Yes, we’re looking for a new food, but this is what he’s eating now.) A meal is half a can of food, making it cost $.85.
So the canned food is $.85 per serving and the raw food, at $.34 per serving, is less than half the cost. I’m saving $2 a day for two cats to eat fresh instead of canned canned food. Not bad savings!
What About that Grinder?
I can almost hear someone asking about my grinder. It’s true, I bought my grinder specifically for making cat food, so it’s fair to ask how it factors into the equation.
Well, if I’m saving $2 a day, let’s apply that toward the cost of a grinder. If I bought a Tasin TS-108 ($150), which is what many people use for grinding meat for cat food, it would take 74 days to pay for itself from the savings over canned food.
I went all out and bought a Weston #12 grinder, which was more costly ($457). It will be 225 days until the savings over the cost of canned food pays for the grinder. If it hadn’t been for being able to project it paying for itself in well under a year, it would have been a lot harder for me to justify the higher-horsepower grinder!
It’s Not All About Saving Money
So that’s the long answer about how much it costs to to make your own raw cat food. The numbers assume you’re going to feed the same food day after day, week after week. Some cats do better with that than others! Ashton is starting to show signs of boredom with that, so I’m going to start rotating some other foods into their raw diet, which will no doubt nudge these numbers one direction or another. Happy cats at mealtime make happy humans.
I also wanted to note that I didn’t start down the road to feeding raw because it was less expensive. If it was all about the cost, I could have just fed my cats grocery store kibble. I actually started because Pierre was having so much trouble keeping his commercial canned food down for a while that I wanted him to benefit from something more digestible.
Of course, cats being cats, Ashton and Newton took to raw, and Pierre is the only one who won’t touch it. His stomach is much better on a different canned food he is eating now, and who knows, maybe someday he will be curious enough about Ashton’s bowl that he’ll give it a try, too. Until then, I’m paying more to feed him canned food than I am to feed the other two cats raw food, and that’s OK, too. It’s really about keeping your cat healthy and happy, and even among my cats, that isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing!