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
When picking treats:
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Ingredients: Make sure they’re healthy and simple.
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Treat count + calories per treat: These tell you how much training value you get, and how many calories your doggo is consuming.
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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 hundreds of calories each—and people hand out several a day. Even “training treats” are often 2–5 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? A bunch of smaller fireworks, 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.
Make It Simple
If you want a healthy, training-focused option that checks every box, give Doggo Discs a try:
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Single-ingredient
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Human-grade
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Less than 1 calorie per treat
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About $0.07–0.09 per treat (and cheaper in bulk)
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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.