Home-cooked recipes, honestly analysed
Build a recipe sized to your dog, then see exactly what it delivers against the NRC reference standard — and, more importantly, what it misses.
Read this before you cook
A study of 200 published home-prepared recipes for healthy adult dogs found that only nine met the NRC minimum for every essential nutrient — and five of those nine were written by board-certified veterinary nutritionists. The same result has been replicated on other recipe collections since.
That is not an argument against cooking for your dog. It is an argument for knowing what your recipe is short of, which is what this tool is for. A whole-food recipe will essentially never meet calcium, vitamin D, iodine, zinc and copper on its own — those gaps need a balancing supplement, not more chicken.
Build a starting recipe
Enter your dog’s daily calorie requirement. If you do not know it, the feeding plan calculator works it out from weight, body condition, age and activity.
How the analysis works
Nutrient values for every ingredient come from USDA FoodData Central, not from a hand-typed table — twenty-nine nutrients across dozens of ingredients is more data than anyone can transcribe accurately, and one wrong micronutrient would quietly corrupt every analysis built on it.
Totals are expressed per 1,000 kcal, which is how NRC states its allowances and the only basis on which recipes of different calorie densities can be compared.
Where USDA does not report a nutrient — iodine and chloride are missing for most foods — the analysis says no data rather than counting it as zero. A gap in the source data is not a deficiency in your recipe, and conflating the two would make every analysis look alarming.
Ingredients are checked against our food safety database every time a recipe is analysed. Anything classed as unsafe cannot enter a recipe at all.
When to see a nutritionist
If your dog has a diagnosed condition — kidney disease, pancreatitis, liver disease, bladder stones, food allergy — a generic recipe is not appropriate and this tool is not a substitute for one that is. A board-certified veterinary nutritionist (ACVN in the US, ECVCN in Europe) can formulate a diet for the specific condition. Ask your vet for a referral.