8 Best Fresh Food Delivery Services For Dogs

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, preservative-free, cooked at low temperatures, and never deep frozen.

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 its 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. (Real, fresh food has a shorter shelf life.)

Evermore is run by a professional chef and a dog care professional. After seeing their own pets thrive from home-cooked diets, they founded Evermore, a delivery service of gentle, immune-supportive homemade dog food. Their food is made from free-range chicken, humanely raised grass-fed beef, and pasture-raised eggs — along with many organic fruits and veggies like sweet potatoes, carrots, and blueberries. 

Their plans are highly customizable; buyers can mix and match meals and choose a purchase frequency of one time, one week, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, or eight weeks. All plans starts at $104 for eight meals. 

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 free of additives and preservatives, and 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.)

The Pets Table was launched last year by the makers of Hello Fresh. After you take a quiz about your pup, The Pets Table matches you with the best plan for you and your dog. Their meals are made in the USA, high in fiber, packed with superfoods, and include postbiotics for gut health. The fresh food plan is made without preservatives and delivered frozen; the recipes include chicken casserole with green beans, beef stew with carrots, and turkey casserole with broccoli.  

The Pets Table sends a trial box with two weeks worth of food — and if your pup doesn’t love it, you get your money back. The Fresh Plan is about $2.89 per meal.

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 Trust, a center for regenerative agriculture in California.