Should I Buy Expensive Dog Treats or Make My Own?

Zach
May 31
3 min read

Should I Buy Expensive Dog Treats or Make My Own?

I've been on both sides of this question. My wife and I made homemade chicken jerky treats for our dachshunds for years before we ever sold a single bag. We had the dehydrator running on weekends, we learned the right temperature (165°F internal to be safe with poultry), we dialed in the thickness and the dehydration time to get that perfect crunch. We were the people who made their own treats.

So when I say I understand the appeal of DIY, I mean it. But I also know exactly what it actually costs, in time, equipment, and materials, and I think a lot of the "just make your own!" advice glosses over the real math.

The Real Cost of Making Dog Treats at Home

Let's be honest about what homemade chicken jerky actually requires:

Equipment: A quality food dehydrator runs anywhere from $50 to $200+. The cheap ones often don't heat evenly or reach safe internal temperatures reliably, which matters a lot with poultry. If you're going to do this properly, you need a dehydrator you can trust.

Ingredients: Chicken breast is not cheap, especially in the quantity you need to make a meaningful batch. By the time you account for moisture loss during dehydration (chicken breast loses roughly 60-70% of its weight), a pound of raw chicken yields about 4-5 oz of finished jerky. At current grocery prices, you're often spending $4-6 in raw chicken alone to make a small bag of treats.

Time: A proper dehydration run takes 8 hours minimum. That's 8 hours with the machine running, plus prep time for slicing, plus cleanup. It's not difficult, but it's not passive either. If you're doing it right, you're investing 30-45 minutes of active time plus most of a day with the dehydrator going.

Food safety: This one's on you. You need to know that you've hit safe internal temperatures and dehydrated long enough for the treats to be shelf-stable. My wife and I spent time in the food industry for a few years, so food safety isn't a foreign concept to us. But for someone without that background, there's a real learning curve.

When Homemade Makes Sense

If you genuinely enjoy the process, have a dog with very specific needs that nothing on the market addresses, or you're making treats in bulk for multiple dogs, the DIY route can be rewarding and cost-effective. There's also something undeniably satisfying about handing your dog something you made yourself.

Curious about dehydrating your own treats?

Check out one of our other articles

When Buying Makes More Sense

Here's what we realized as we scaled from home batch-making to a real business: at a certain point, your time has value. The hours you spend dehydrating chicken on a Sunday are hours you're not spending with your family, on your hobbies, or just resting.

That's part of why we built JUST CHKN the way we did, to offer the same single-ingredient, made-fresh product that we were making at home, at a price point that actually competes with premium commercial treats on a per-ounce basis. We buy our chicken from the same local grocery stores we shop at ourselves, keep our operation lean and home-based (no warehouses, no mass production), and pass that value on through bag sizes that are significantly larger than what you'd get from most premium brands.

Our customers notice this. One of the most common reactions we hear is surprise at how full the bags are, because compared to $20 for 3-5 oz of a big-brand premium treat, a JUST CHKN bag at the same price point is a pretty different picture.

The Bottom Line

If you have the time, equipment, and interest, making your own treats is a great option and I'll always respect it. That's literally how this business started.

But if you want the same simplicity and quality without the Sunday dehydrator sessions, that's exactly what we built JUST CHKN to be. So... should you buy expensive dog treats or make your own?