Price per 1,000 kcal, explained

Pedigree Adult Complete works out at £0.69 per 1,000 kcal. Royal Canin Maxi Adult comes to £1.08 per 1,000 kcal and Hill's Science Plan Adult Large Light to £1.19 per 1,000 kcal. Those figures come from zooplus.co.uk prices read on 2 November 2026 and the calories the store states.

You feed a dog to a calorie need, so what a food costs per calorie gets nearer the real bill than what it costs per kilo. Nothing here was fed to a dog by me: it's labels, prices and named sources, plus my opinion.

The sum

Take Pedigree. £29.09 for 12 kg is £2.42/kg. Divide that by 3,530 kcal/kg, multiply by 1,000, and you land on £0.69 per 1,000 kcal.

Three steps on a phone calculator. You need the pack price, the pack weight and a calorie figure from the bag or the store page. Our guide to reading the calories on a pet food label shows where that figure hides.

Where it reverses the kilo price

Hill's Large Light was £3.71/kg when I read it, and Royal Canin Maxi £4.27/kg. By the kilo, Hill's looked the better deal.

The calorie figures say otherwise. The store gives Hill's 3,130 kcal/kg and Royal Canin 3,941 kcal/kg, so a dog needs more of the Hill's by weight to get the same energy. Per 1,000 kcal the pair came out at £1.19 per 1,000 kcal and £1.08 per 1,000 kcal. On those readings, the order flipped.

That's the case for the unit. It only holds while the prices do, so rerun it when you buy.

From there to a year

Merck's formula for a neutered adult dog is 70 x kg^0.75 x 1.6 kcal a day. A 30 kg dog comes out at 1,436 kcal a day, which is 524 lots of 1,000 kcal a year. Multiply that 524 by the figure for your food.

Merck adds that one animal may need as much as 30% more or fewer calories than another of the same weight. Those pounds are a budget. The pet cost calculator runs the same formula on any weight.

What the figure leaves out

Protein and everything else. Pedigree lists 20 % protein and Royal Canin 26 %. The calorie price ignores that gap. Ohio State University's vet centre lists three tests for a diet, and "economical", meaning "a price per Calorie that fits your budget", comes last, after appropriate and satisfactory. I think that's the right order.

Purpose. The zooplus page describes Hill's Large Light as having "reduced energy content". Fewer calories per kilo is the point of that food, so a high calorie price says little about it. If your vet picked it, this sum doesn't apply.

Bag size. Each figure belongs to one bag. Zooplus lists Royal Canin Maxi in a 10 kg bag at a higher kilo price than the 15 kg one, so a smaller bag gives a worse result on the same food.

How sure the calories are. Those numbers are the store's or maker's statement, not something I measured. Zooplus doesn't even name them consistently: "metabolisable energy" on Royal Canin, "calories that can be burned" on Pedigree and Hill's. Merck defines metabolisable energy as the portion of a diet's total energy retained within the body.

Foods with no figure. AVA Optimum Health is £3.47/kg on Pets at Home, and its page gives no calories. That means no sum. I won't guess one.

These three foods are examples, not a market ranking. The longer list is in best-value dry food for large dogs.