The Treat Bag Problem Every Dog Owner Has and Nobody Talks About
The big bag of food has a solution. It lives in a bin, or a tub, or a closet somewhere, and everyone has worked out a system for it.
The treats are a different story. Treats get used constantly, in small amounts, at unpredictable moments: coming in from a walk, during training, when the vet visit needs recovering from, whenever somebody has been good. So the bag stays out. It gets rolled over and clipped, or not clipped, and it sits on the counter looking like exactly what it is, which is a bag of food on a kitchen counter.
Two things go wrong
The first is staleness. A rolled bag is not sealed, and dry treats lose their smell over a few weeks. You will notice this before your dog does, and your dog will notice it eventually, which is roughly when a training treat stops being worth working for.
The second is that the bag never gets put away, because putting it away makes it useless. The entire point of a treat is that you can reach it in the two seconds after the good behavior happens. Anything that lives behind a cabinet door is too slow, so the bag stays out, and a bag out on a counter is one of those small things that makes a kitchen feel untidy no matter how clean it is.
The fix is a container you are willing to look at
This is not a complicated problem. It needs a small sealed container that is nice enough to leave on the counter, because a container that has to be hidden solves nothing.
The size matters more than people expect. A big canister seems sensible until you realize you are decanting a whole bag into it and the treats at the bottom are three months old. Something that holds a week or two, refilled from the bag in the pantry, keeps everything fresher and takes up less of the counter.
Ours is a ribbed screw-top canister, just under five inches tall and a bit over two across, in a warm brown with a vertical ribbed texture. The lid threads on rather than pressing, so it closes properly, and the ribs mean you can grip and twist it with one hand while the other hand is holding a leash, a dog, or both. The design is licensed from Bosmans Print Studio.
Being clear about scale: this is a treat-sized canister, not bulk food storage. It holds small portions, which is deliberate, and it is for dry contents. If you are looking for something to empty a thirty pound sack into, this is emphatically not that.