A home-cooked recipe made for your dog, your country and your kitchen

Maggie’s food plan works out how many grams your dog needs at each meal, then Leo writes a home-cooked recipe for him from foods your family cooks, in the names used in your country. Every recipe is checked for calories, nutrients, bowl size and allergies before you see it, and one that fails is not shown. For a quick estimate of your dog’s daily calories, try the dog food calculator.

A recipe from the internet was written for no dog in particular. It does not know that yours weighs 16 kg, or that your family does not cook beef. The food plan in Maggie starts from the other end: one dog, one kitchen, and numbers that are checked before you see them.

First, grams for each meal

You tell Maggie what your dog eats in a day: each meal or snack, dry food from a bag, wet food, or home-cooked. For packaged food she asks for the calories on the pack. No pack to hand? “Use a typical dry food” gets you started.

From his weight, his age and whether he is neutered, Maggie works out his calories for the day. If he is on a weight plan, she uses his goal weight. The food plan screen then shows “In his bowl today”: grams for each meal.

Then, a recipe written for him

There are four kinds of recipe:

• A home recipe. His full meals, cooked at home.
• Something fresh on his dry food. A small fresh topping. His dry food stays.
• An occasional meal. For one day, not his everyday food.
• A treat. It counts towards his treats.

Leo, the AI companion in the app, makes the recipe. Fixed rules pick the foods and work out the grams; no AI model sets a gram. What goes in depends on three things.

Your dog. The amounts are sized to his calories for the day. Any allergy on his record is left out.

Your family. On “Your family’s food” you say what you do not cook at home (beef, pork, all meat, fish or eggs) and which protein the recipe should use. In India you also choose the cooking style: Indian, Western or both. Leo only uses foods your family cooks.

Your country. Recipes are made for dogs in India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Maggie names the foods the way you do there: mutton (goat meat) in India, courgette in the United Kingdom and zucchini in the United States and Canada, porridge oats, oatmeal or rolled oats. Amounts are in grams. If you use pounds in the app, ounces are shown beside the grams. Recipes are not made for other countries yet.

What Maggie checks before you see it

Leo proposes. Maggie checks every recipe again, with her own rules, and a recipe that fails is not shown. For a home recipe that means:

• Calories. Within 2% of his day.
• Nutrients. Every minimum that Maggie checks for an adult dog is met, and nothing goes over an upper limit. The numbers come from the FEDIAF nutritional guidelines for adult dogs.
• Size. The day’s bowl is at most 4% of his body weight.
• Your limits. His allergies and the foods your family does not cook are left out.

When a recipe cannot meet every nutrient from food alone, the screen says “This recipe needs a supplement” and gives a list to show your vet or the shop. A general multivitamin is not a substitute.

Under each recipe, “How Maggie checked it” shows the calories, the nutrients and what was left out.

Starting it, and keeping it right

A sudden change of food is hard on a stomach. “Start the 7-day switch” mixes a little more of the recipe into his old food each day: on days 1 and 2 mostly his dry food, on days 3 and 4 half and half, on days 5 and 6 mostly the recipe, and on day 7 the recipe only.

One thing to get right at the scale: weigh each food raw, before you cook it. “Cook for 3 days” gives the raw weight of each food for 1 to 7 days of meals, the oil, the water for the pot, and how many equal boxes to fill. If Maggie has no raw weight for a food yet, the list says to weigh that one after cooking. Keep 1 day of food in the fridge and freeze the rest on the day you cook.

The list carries the mark PREVIEW. The cooking values behind it, such as how much water a food takes up in the pot, have not been reviewed by a vet yet. “How Maggie checked it” says that the amounts are close, not exact.

If your dog is on a weight plan, Maggie looks at his weigh-ins. After 4 weigh-ins over 2 weeks she may change his amount, and she resizes the same recipe so the whole day still gives him what he needs.

What it is not

The recipe screen says it plainly: “Made by AI, not by a human nutritionist.” The food data, the nutrient rules behind the checks and the cooking values have not been reviewed by a vet yet. Show the recipe to your vet before you change how you feed your dog.

Some dogs get no recipe from the app. A dog that is unwell, on a vet diet, expecting, very overweight or underweight sees “needs a vet’s feeding advice first”. A growing puppy gets grams for his meals, but no home-cooked meal recipe: small mistakes in calcium or energy can harm growing bones. And the food plan is for dogs. For a cat, the app says: “Food plans are not available for this pet yet.”

A recipe uses 1 Leo message. On the free plan you have 5 Leo messages a day. The grams for each meal use none.

Where Maggie fits

Maggie keeps the weight, the allergies and the family’s choices, so each new recipe starts from what is true today. Not sure which foods are never safe? Read toxic foods for dogs first.

Leo is an AI companion, not a veterinarian. For medical concerns, and before any significant diet change, always consult your vet.