What homemade dog food really costs in India — with receipts

Until yesterday our site costed a bowl using grocery prices we had estimated in a meeting. They were roughly half what things actually cost. That is the wrong direction to be wrong in — quote someone a low number and let reality correct it upward later, and you have lost them at the till.

So rather than argue about it, we bought the shopping list and photographed the carts.

Meat prices: Licious, Chennai

The same cuts cheaper: FreshToHome

Three of the four were cheaper on FreshToHome, so that is where we priced them. A real shopper does not average across apps — they pick.

On lamb and goat: both are sold and bought as “mutton” here, and which one your butcher has is a matter of the day. So we price the cheaper of the two — lamb at ₹1,548/kg against goat at ₹1,702 — because that is what a shopper would put in the basket. Worth knowing they are not nutritionally identical: goat is the leaner meat, so a bowl built on lamb runs a little richer.

Vegetable prices: Blinkit

Our vegetable mix is half ash gourd, then five others at a tenth each. That matters, because the cheap half and the dear half are very far apart: ash gourd works out at ₹39/kg and button/oyster mushroom at ₹367/kg. Anyone quoting a single “mixed veg” price is quoting the wrong thing. The blend comes to ₹88.60/kg.

On mushrooms, since people ask: button and oyster are both fine for dogs and cats — cooked and plain, with no onion or garlic in the pan. The mushrooms to avoid are wild foraged ones, which is a different problem entirely.

The discounts are real, and they compound

We publish the paid line, not the MRP and not the post-cashback figure. The paid line is what the bill says and what you can check against the listing yourself. The cashback is real money — it recycles through the wallet and a regular buyer genuinely spends about a tenth less — but it depends on holding a membership, so building it into a published rate would make our number unverifiable for everyone else.

Which means the figures below are, if anything, on the high side.

So what did a homemade bowl cost that day?

Three bowls a day in both cases. The cat’s bowl costs about what a coffee does; the dog’s costs about what lunch does.

These are the numbers as they stood on 30 August 2026, computed from the carts above. Grocery prices move, so we have not frozen them into the site — the calculator always uses current rates, and will disagree with this page once prices shift. That is the calculator being right, not this page being wrong.

What these prices are, and what they aren’t

This is premium delivery pricing, deliberately. Licious, FreshToHome and Blinkit all charge a convenience premium — the “free” delivery is recovered in the item price. We priced it there because that is where our customers actually shop, us included. If you buy at a wet market or from a butcher you know, you will pay meaningfully less than every figure on this page.

Curd, added after the fact. We missed it on the day and went back for it: Amul’s 900 g tub works out at ₹60/kg and Heritage’s 1 kg at ₹131/kg on Blinkit — a 2.2× spread, the widest of anything in the basket. We price the cheaper, as you would. Worth knowing if you have been buying whichever tub was nearest.

Prices move. This is one city, one day, three apps, and we have shown you the carts so you can check the arithmetic or redo it with your own shops.

Work out what your own pet’s bowl costs →