Freshpet Delivery Review: We Tried 3 Recipes With Our Picky Dog

Freshpet has been around long enough that most dog owners probably recognize the brand, but Freshpet Delivery is a different way to buy and feed its fresh food. Instead of picking something out of the Freshpet refrigerator at the grocery store, you build a personalized meal plan and have fresh food shipped directly to your door.

We tried three Freshpet Delivery recipes with Freya: Shredded Chicken, Beef and Chicken, and Chicken and Turkey. She happily ate all three, which is saying something considering how picky she’s been lately.

The Shredded Chicken was another matter entirely. She absolutely loves it.

Freshpet Delivery Ship Straight To Your Home

Freshpet Delivery takes a familiar fresh dog food brand and turns it into a much more personalized service. Instead of figuring out portions yourself, you get a meal plan and feeding guidelines based on your dog, with fresh, gently cooked food delivered right to your door.

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What Makes Freshpet Delivery Different?

Freshpet has been making refrigerated pet food since 2006, so this isn’t a new company suddenly jumping into fresh dog food. Its refrigerated foods are sold in thousands of stores across the country, and those Freshpet refrigerators have become pretty hard to miss.

Freshpet Delivery takes the company’s fresh-food approach and builds a subscription service around it.

You start by answering questions about your dog, including weight, activity level, body condition, food sensitivities, and health goals. Freshpet uses that information to recommend recipes and determine how much food your dog needs. You also receive personalized feeding guidelines with your deliveries.

It’s worth clearing up one point that can be confusing if you’re already familiar with Freshpet’s retail foods: Freshpet Delivery has its own recipes.

You may see Freshpet foods in stores that look or sound similar, but the Delivery recipes aren’t simply the regular retail products put into a subscription box. They’re part of the Delivery program and are ordered online.

Freshpet also gives you some flexibility in how much fresh food you want to feed. You can use it as your dog’s complete diet or combine it with the food you’re already feeding. I like that because switching to fresh food doesn’t necessarily have to be an all-or-nothing decision.

The subscription itself is flexible, too. You can adjust upcoming shipments or reschedule a delivery through your account before the order is processed.

Freshpet Delivery Quick Overview

What Goes Into Freshpet Delivery Recipes?

Ingredients vary by recipe, which is important to keep in mind if your dog has allergies or sensitivities. Chicken, in particular, appears in quite a few of the current options.

There are some common themes across the Freshpet Delivery lineup, though.

Freshpet uses natural animal proteins along with fruits and vegetables, and real meat is the first ingredient in the recipes we tried. The company doesn’t use rendered meat meals, meat powders, or by-product meals in its Delivery recipes, and the foods don’t contain added preservatives.

You can also actually identify quite a few of the ingredients when you look at the food. Depending on the recipe, that can include carrots, cranberries, sweet potatoes, green beans, spinach, pumpkin, and other fruits and vegetables.

The Shredded Chicken Recipe starts with U.S. farm-raised chicken and contains pumpkin, cranberries, carrots, and green beans. It’s made without gluten, soy, fillers, added preservatives, meat meals, or by-product meals.

The Beef and Chicken Recipe combines beef and chicken with ingredients such as eggs, sweet potatoes, carrots, green beans, spinach, cranberries, and lentils.

The Chicken and Turkey Recipe uses U.S.-sourced chicken and turkey along with antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables, including cranberries, sweet potatoes, carrots, and green beans.

Freshpet gently steam-cooks its foods rather than serving them raw, and the company says every batch undergoes more than 20 quality and safety tests before leaving its kitchens.

One other distinction worth making: not every Freshpet recipe has exactly the same formulation or dietary attributes. Some are grain-free, for example, while others may contain grains. Check the individual recipe rather than assuming that something that applies to one Freshpet food applies across the entire lineup.

Top Freshpet Delivery Features

• Fresh, gently cooked dog food
• Real animal protein as the first ingredient
• Recognizable fruits and vegetables
• No rendered meat meals or by-product meals
• No added preservatives
• Multiple flavors and textures
• Personalized meal recommendations
• Feeding amounts calculated for your dog
• Full and partial feeding options
• Ability to customize the recipes in your order
• Fresh food delivered directly to your home
• Free shipping
• Flexible delivery scheduling
• Resealable, refrigerator-friendly bags
• No thawing required for normal feeding
• Food can be frozen if you need longer storage
• More than 20 quality and safety tests performed on meals before they leave Freshpet kitchens
• Optional refrigerated treats available with your order

Freshpet Delivery Pros and Cons

Our Experience With Freshpet Delivery

We’ve bought Freshpet plenty of times before, usually the loaf-style food from the refrigerated section at the store. I’ve often used it as a topper, so Freya was already familiar with the brand.

The Delivery service and these particular recipes were new territory for us. They also arrived at a very good time.

Freya was recently diagnosed with heart disease, and for a while her appetite was a mess. Between being sick and adjusting to new medications, she went through a stretch where getting her to eat enough became something of a daily negotiation.

Her appetite has finally come back as she’s adjusted to everything, but she’s remained much pickier about dog food than she was before.

During the worst of it, one thing she would reliably eat was plain shredded chicken. That’s why I chose the Shredded Chicken Recipe first.

I wanted to give her something that looked and tasted familiar, but I also wanted to get her back to eating a nutritionally complete dog food instead of relying so heavily on whatever assortment of human foods she’d agree to eat that day.

Freshpet’s version worked better than I expected.

Freya ate a big serving of the Shredded Chicken and immediately went looking for more. Considering the amount of coaxing we’d been doing just to get her interested in dog food again, that got my attention.

Next up was the Beef and Chicken Recipe. She cleaned out the bowl. Then we tried Chicken and Turkey. That disappeared, too.

All three passed the Freya test, but there’s absolutely no question which one won. She loves the Shredded Chicken.

And yes, I mean LOVES it.

Beyond Freya’s opinion, the thing I’ve appreciated most about Freshpet Delivery is how uncomplicated it is.

The food arrives fresh and goes directly into the refrigerator. Unlike many fresh dog food delivery services that ship meals frozen, Freshpet Delivery is designed to be stored refrigerated until you’re ready to use it. Unopened packages can stay in the refrigerator until the Sell By date, and Freshpet recommends using an opened bag within seven days.

You can freeze extra portions if you need to, but you don’t have to devote half your freezer to the next several weeks of dog food. With everything else currently competing for space in mine, I consider that a legitimate perk.

The resealable bags are also easier to deal with than bulky containers. Open one, scoop out what you need, seal it back up, and return it to the refrigerator.

Freshpet is meant to be served cold, but Freya sometimes prefers her food a little warmer. It’s easy enough to put her portion in a microwave-safe bowl and warm it very briefly.

The Personalized Plans Are Super Useful

Freshpet’s plan builder asks about more than your dog’s weight. It also considers things like activity level, body condition, food sensitivities, and certain health goals before making recommendations.

You don’t have to blindly accept whatever it suggests, either.

I like being able to see the recommendations and then customize the order around what I know Freya will actually eat. A mathematically perfect assortment isn’t especially useful if one flavor spends the week sitting untouched in the refrigerator while your dog waits for you to reconsider your choices.

Freshpet also gives you flexibility in how much of your dog’s diet you want the food to cover. A Full Plan supplies 100% of the recommended daily amount, while a Half Plan provides 50% and is designed to be mixed with your dog’s current food. You can also use Freshpet as a topper if you just want to add some fresh food to your dog’s existing meals.

That flexibility can also make the cost easier to manage, particularly if you’re feeding a larger dog.

How Does Delivery Compare to Buying Freshpet at the Store?

This is where it’s important to separate Freshpet the brand from Freshpet Delivery.

You can find Freshpet refrigerated foods in grocery and pet stores all over the country. However, the recipes offered through Freshpet Delivery are part of the Delivery service and aren’t the exact same recipes you’ll find sitting in the Freshpet refrigerator at your local store.

There may be similar flavors, proteins, and formats, but you’re not simply paying someone to ship the grocery-store version to your house.

For me, the bigger appeal is not having to think about what’s available locally in the first place.

I can choose the Delivery recipes Freya likes, set up a recurring shipment, and have them show up at the house rather than checking the Freshpet refrigerator whenever I’m at the grocery store and seeing what happens to be available that week.

You also get the personalized feeding recommendations and portion guidance that come with the Delivery program, which makes it feel more like a meal service than an online grocery order.

We Tried the Freshpet Treats, Too

Naturally, we couldn’t stop at the meals.

We also tried Dognation Turkey Bacon Treats and Dognation Chicken Treats, and Freya was very happy with both decisions.

The Chicken Treats have a fairly short ingredient list: chicken, ground oats, chicken broth, salt, natural flavors, vinegar, and celery powder.

The Turkey Bacon Treats are made with turkey, water, pea fiber, salt, potassium chloride, and celery powder.

These are refrigerated treats, so don’t toss the bag into the regular treat cabinet and rediscover it three weeks later. They need to stay in the refrigerator after you bring them home.

The packages aren’t huge. The Turkey Bacon comes in a 3-ounce bag, while the Chicken Treats come in a 6.4-ounce bag. That said, the treats themselves are surprisingly lightweight, so there were more pieces inside than I expected based on the package size.

Freya had no complaints about the quantity. She was mostly concerned with why I kept closing the refrigerator.

Where Freshpet Delivery Has Room to Grow

The main limitation for me is recipe variety, specifically for dogs who can’t eat chicken.

Chicken appears in most of the current Freshpet Delivery recipes. The Beef, Turkey and Lamb Recipe gives you a chicken-free choice, but I’d like to see several more.

I’d also like more single-protein recipes.

The Shredded Chicken is the obvious example of why. A straightforward recipe centered around one animal protein can be useful when you already know what agrees with your dog or when you’re trying to keep their diet relatively simple.

A single-protein turkey or beef option would make the lineup much more flexible.

Cost is another consideration, although that’s hardly unique to Freshpet. Fresh food generally costs more than kibble or canned food, particularly when you’re feeding a medium or large dog.

The Half Plan and topper approach can help if you want to feed fresh without paying for a complete fresh-food diet every day.

You’ll also need refrigerator space. Freshpet Delivery doesn’t require the freezer space that frozen meal subscriptions do, which helps considerably, but a large shipment still has to live somewhere.

Is Freshpet Delivery Worth Trying?

I think Freshpet Delivery makes the most sense for someone who already likes the idea of feeding fresh food but wants the convenience and structure of a subscription.

You get personalized feeding recommendations, flexible meal amounts, recurring free delivery, and food that’s ready to scoop straight from the refrigerator. There’s no thawing schedule to remember, and you can adjust upcoming deliveries through your account when necessary.

I’d still like to see more chicken-free and single-protein recipes added to the lineup. That’s the biggest gap for me right now.

For Freya, however, Freshpet Delivery has been a pretty resounding success.

After watching her spend weeks treating perfectly good dog food as though I’d personally offended her by putting it in the bowl, seeing her finish all three Freshpet recipes was encouraging.

Seeing her reaction to the Shredded Chicken was even better.

Apparently, we’ve found the food she’d like me to keep buying. She has made her position quite clear.

Freshpet Delivery Ship Straight To Your Home

Freshpet Delivery takes a familiar fresh dog food brand and turns it into a much more personalized service. Instead of figuring out portions yourself, you get a meal plan and feeding guidelines based on your dog, with fresh, gently cooked food delivered right to your door.

BEST PRICE GUARANTEED

SAVE 55% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER WITH FRESHPETPPA55

Check Price

We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.