Turn over any bag of pet food and you will find a table: weight of dog on the left, cups per day on the right. Look closely and the numbers are a range — “2½ to 3½ cups” for a 20kg dog. That is a 40% spread. Applied every day for a year, the difference between the bottom and the top of that range is roughly 60,000 calories, or about eleven kilograms of body weight for an animal that should weigh twenty.
The range exists because the bag cannot know the animal. Two 20kg dogs can differ by 30% in daily requirement depending on age, breed, neuter status, coat, temperature and how much of the day they spend actually moving. A working spaniel and a nine-year-old neutered labrador are not the same problem.
What we calculate instead
Every Mera plan starts from resting energy requirement — a curve, not a line, because energy needs scale to roughly the three-quarter power of body weight rather than proportionally. We then apply factors for age, neuter status, body condition score and activity, and check the result against the breed’s known tendencies. The output is one number: kilocalories per day, for one animal.
Then we weigh it. Each portion leaves the kitchen within two grams of its target, in a pack labelled with the animal’s name. There is no cup, no scoop and nothing to estimate at home, because estimation is where the 40% goes.
And then we check
The first calculation is a hypothesis. We ask for a weigh-in at four weeks and again at twelve, and we adjust: a plan that does not respond to the animal in front of it is just a more expensive bag. Roughly a third of plans get revised after the first check-in, most of them downward — owners, ourselves included, are consistently generous.