What is the Most Affordable Daily Dental Treat?

I recently posted about Bright Bites daily dental treats, which had me pondering the actual cost of feeding dental treats every day. Little things like that really add up! I love collecting data, so I took a tour of the major online retailers to see how much, or how little, it would cost to feed my dogs a daily dental treat every day.

The Criteria

Photo by Erin Koski

For the purpose of comparison, I chose to include only products that were both marketed and packaged for daily use. Though I can find many individually-wrapped dental treats at my local pet stores, I only included those that could also be purchased in a larger quantity. Few people are going to buy 30 individually-wrapped Bright Bites for the month, but plenty will buy four bags of 8. A company that sells a bunch of dental chews in one bag is definitely taking that "daily dental care" thing seriously.

I also chose to specifically compare products intended for a size range that included both of my girls. So most of these are labeled for medium or regular-sized dogs. Sisci Godzilla weighs 28 pounds, and Zip weighs 36 pounds.

The Results

Cheap

The absolute cheapest dental chew marketed for daily use is Dingo Dental Sticks, at 17-cents each if you buy the bag of 48 sticks on Amazon. The next cheapest is Purina's DentaLife treats at 23-cents each if you buy the package of 40, followed by Pedigree DentaStix, Purina Beneful Healthy Smile Dental Twists, and Milkbone Brushing Chews, ranging from $0.33 to $0.41 per chew. Yes, these are all grocery-store brands, mostly made from by-products. I expected them to all be made in China, but surprisingly all but the Dingo treats are made in the USA.

Standard

Greenies makes the classic daily dental chew, before them I don't remember anything being marketed for daily use like that. Their price point is right in the middle of the pack at $0.81 per regular-sized chew in a package of 36. Bright Bites were slightly more expensive at #1 per chew, along with KaNoodles and Ilio TeethTreats.

Absurd

Every time I see Cloud Star's Dynamo Dog dental chews I am horrified by the price. In the largest package sold, these things will set you back a whopping $2.31 per bone. Yes, they are grain-free and potato-free, but they would also cost $70 per month to feed on a daily basis. Yikes!

Surprise!

Pretty much all of the dental treats (with one freakishly expensive exception) are made from wheat, rice, potato, rawhide, or a combination of these. Many of the more affordable ones are made with chicken by-products as well. I decided beforehand that my personal standards for a dental chew product was that it had to be made in the USA without by-products. I expected the least expensive daily dental chew that met these standards to be somewhere in the middle of the price range. 

Nope! It's Pedigree DentaStix, the third from the bottom at $0.33 per chew. Made in the USA. No by-products. Crazy.

I was also very surprised to see Missing Link's Once Daily dental chew towards the cheap end of the spectrum. This product also contains a daily dose of Missing Link's skin and coat supplement, and somehow it's only $0.52 per chew. I had dismissed the idea of daily dental chews as being too expensive, but it looks like they can be surprisingly affordable!

What's an Affordable Alternative to Beneful?

What is a cost-effective, affordable alternative to Beneful? I feed my dogs all sorts of amazing top-quality foods, but this isn't feasible for everybody. The fact is, the vast majority of the general public has no idea what makes a good dog food, and there's a whole ton of fear-mongering on every level. It's tough to sort things out. 

Many, many people feed their dogs Purina's Beneful, and the pending class action lawsuit has a lot of those people wondering what is a safer or better alternative. This topic just came up with a Facebook friend recently. In years gone by, I would have extolled the virtues of raw food, or grain-free food, but these days I feel I can do the most good by meeting people where they're at right now. Beneful is cheap and widely available, I'm not going to get very far by suggesting people double their dog food bill and trek to their nearest specialty store. Here's what I told my friends:

Isn't Beneful Healthy?

Purina spends a crazy amount of money on marketing. They produce attention-grabbing commercials and beautiful packaging that very deliberately conveys the message that Beneful is healthy. The products themselves have names like "Healthy Weight" and "Healthy Smile". The constant message of health and wellness sticks with people on a subconscious as well as conscious level, Purina has done an amazing job associating Beneful with "healthy". This is why tons and tons and tons of people truly think that Beneful is a really healthy food for their dog. 

I've come to accept that most people don't live in the dog world the way I do. Most people buy their dog food at the grocery store, and need never set foot in a pet store at all. These people are probably unaware of the vast majority of dog foods on the market. They see the dozen or so brands at the grocery store, and of those Beneful is the one with the best marketing. People don't just think Beneful is great because they are ignorant, and I feel it is very important to acknowledge the role of marketing in this perception. 

So Why is Beneful So Bad?

Class action lawsuit notwithstanding, Beneful isn't particularly worse than most of the other foods at the grocery store. The issue with these foods is that they tend to be made out of by-products from other industries. Most people can imagine what meat by-products consist of without going into disgusting detail, so unless they ask why by-products are so bad I can leave it at that. 

The first two ingredients in Beneful Originals chicken kibble are ground yellow corn and chicken by-product meal. One of the people in our Facebook conversation said they feed their dogs Pedigree as an alternative. The first two ingredients in Pedigree Adult chicken kibble are ground whole grain corn, followed by meat and bone meal. That's actually worse than Beneful, in my lofty opinion. Neither of these foods rate well in the dog world, Dog Food Advisor gives Beneful and Pedigree both its lowest rating of one out of five stars.

What is a Cheap and Good Dog Food?

There are tons of dog foods out there that are way better than Beneful or Pedigree. I feel it's important to recommend foods that are in the same price range if I want people to truly consider alternatives. Walmart sells a 30lb bag of Beneful for about $30, that's about a dollar a pound. The place I work sells a 33lb bag of Fromm Classics Adult dog food for $33, that's a dollar a pound for a 3.5 star dog food with no by-products, made by a very highly-regarded company that has never had a recall. It's the best value I am currently aware of, though one must go to a feed store or other specialty store in order to find it. Fromm Classics also has more calories per cup than Beneful, so less of it can be fed for a better value. Rachael Ray Nutrish is also around $1 per pound, and while it only rates 2.5 stars on Dog Food Advisor, it doesn't contain by-products and is widely available. 

For other options, I generally recommend people start by reading labels. By-products are undesirable because they can contain questionable substances from questionable sources. Named meats and meat meals are important. Chicken meal is better than chicken by-product meal, which is better than meat meal. Unintuitively, chicken meal is better than just plain chicken, since it is a more concentrated form of protein, and more of it makes it into the finished product. If people genuinely want to know more, I like to recommend the book Dog Food Logic, particularly for things like industry definitions of ingredients since these don't always match the layperson definitions.

And that's really it. I want people to know that there is better dog food out there, and affordable alternatives exist. There is no need for fear-mongering, scare tactics, or tales of woe. Gory details and hyperbole are out, well-cited and reliable sources of information are in.