These numbers will vary based on you chicken prices. I also did not include the cost of the electricity or the dehydrator in my numbers.
I bought discounted Tyson chicken but I will provide the discounted and full price numbers. Keep in mind this is conventionally raised chicken so I will be comparing the cost of making these treats to the cheapest chicken jerky for dogs I can find online. A sad fact of the pet food industry is that most of it is not made with human grade meats. Even Blue Buffalo doesn’t say their chicken jerky treats are made from human grade meat nor do they mention it being antibiotic free. I would go as far as to argue that my homemade chicken treats are as good quality as blue buffalo treats even using conventional meat.
That being said if you can afford it absolutely buy (or produce) higher quality meats for your treats! We hope to do this in the future.
Discounted Chicken Price: .91/lb or .056/oz.
Full Price Chicken: $1.83/lb or .11/oz.
After dehydrating I ended up with 18.85 oz of chicken jerky. Now let’s compare that to a bag of treats from the store. The cheapest chicken jerky treats I found was Milo's Kitchen. As mentioned in the previous post about homemade treats I would avoid this brand. However, for cost comparison it will work. One 15 oz bag costs $9.09 on amazon or .60/oz. This is .54 cents more than the homemade chicken treats. Even at full price the homemade treats are .49 cents cheaper per ounce! Considering we have 3 dogs we are training I imagine that adds up to a whole lot of saving. And in reality the dehydrator was going to be purchased at some point for our own food so that is not a cost for this project.
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