Buying dog treats is tricky
When we buy food, for ourselves or our pets, we usually look at a few things: price, ingredients, nutritional info, and weight.
Price is (sort of) a proxy for quality. Ingredients and nutrition tell us what's inside and how it'll affect health. Weight tells us how much we're getting.
Most of us are optimizing for "the healthiest, most calories per dollar." $1 for 1000 garbage calories? No thanks. $1000 for one miracle calorie that doubles my dog's lifespan? Tempting, but I also have to eat 🙃. So we settle for something in the middle.
When it comes to treats, though, the math should change. Healthy ingredients still matter, especially if you're training often, but weight and calories per dollar don't. What matters is how many treats you can give and how many training moments you get per dollar, with as few calories per treat as possible.
What to look for on the label
- Ingredients: Make sure they're healthy and simple. The shorter the list, the easier it is to evaluate. (More on that in why we make single-ingredient treats.)
- Treat count and calories per treat: These tell you how much training value you get, and how many calories your doggo is consuming.
- Price per treat: Divide the bag price by the number of treats (e.g., $18 ÷ 200 = $0.09 per treat).
Completely ignore weight. It's meaningless across different processing methods (fresh, air-dried, freeze-dried, etc.) and not what you want to optimize for.
The problem? Treat count and calories per treat are often buried, or missing entirely. Many brands give vague feeding guidelines like "Feed a small handful per day." Whose hand? And are we talking about a Pomeranian or a Great Dane?
If a brand doesn't list calories per treat or number of treats, it's probably because there are too many calories per treat and not enough treats.
Why treat count beats treat size
Many treats are oversized, dozens or even hundreds of calories each, and people hand out several a day. Even "training treats" are often 2 to 5 calories apiece. In one short session, you've fed your dog a quarter of a meal. Not only is that not good for health, but the more calories your dog eats, the more full and less interested in the reward it gets.
Also, dogs aren't impacted as much by size. They care about frequency and flavor.
Think of treats like fireworks. A few giant fireworks? Cool, but over too soon. A full show is a bunch of smaller fireworks, a steady rhythm, and a great finale. That's the experience you remember, while creating memories with your friends and family.
It's the same for dogs. Five one-calorie treats given individually are far more impactful and rewarding than one five-calorie treat. More opportunities to reinforce good behavior, more excitement, more connection.
How professional trainers think about treats
Professional trainers land in the same place. Michael Ellis teaches that when you use food in training, you have three levers to build motivation: quality (find a food your dog finds genuinely palatable), quantity (small pieces, one piece or several in a row, as the moment calls for), and dynamics (how you move and deliver the reward). Small, repeatable pieces are what make the quantity and dynamics levers possible at all. You can't rapid-fire reward with a biscuit the size of a cookie.
Quality is relative, too. In one of Ellis's coaching sessions, a dog blew off small, mediocre pieces because a more exciting association was standing right there. The fix wasn't more food, it was better food for that situation. Save your highest-value stuff for your hardest distractions.
Ian Dunbar goes one step further on the calorie side: he has owners measure out the dog's daily food ration each morning and spend it through the day on training, reserving a small number of special treats for the exercises that matter most, like recalls and socialization. The principle is the same one this whole post is about: a day holds a limited calorie budget, so buy as many training moments with it as you can.
The checklist
- Simple, healthy ingredients you can actually evaluate
- Calories per treat listed, and low (ideally around 1)
- Treat count listed, so you can compute price per treat
- Small enough to feed rep after rep without filling your dog up
- Packaging you'll actually have with you when the training moment shows up
Not sure how many treats a real training habit takes? We did the math in how many training treats do you need.
Make it simple
If you want a healthy, training-focused option that checks every box, give Doggo Discs a try:
- Single-ingredient
- Human-grade
- Less than 1 calorie per treat
- About $0.07–0.09 per treat (and cheaper in bulk)
- Easily breakable into halves or thirds for even more value and reward moments
Most importantly, we haven't met a dog who doesn't go crazy for the beef flavor. (Banana and sweet potato are a matter of taste, but if your pup likes those flavors, they'll love ours.)
We've done the nerd work of engineering the perfect treat so you can do the fun work: training, rewarding, and keeping your dog healthy.
Sources
- Michael Ellis, Engagement Key Principles (V1.08) and Engagement Coaching Session (V1.11), The Michael Ellis School
- Ian Dunbar, Dr. Dunbar's Good Little Dog Book, "Food Lures and Rewards"