Able Junior: Chicken and Beef review

Nine recipes, one band word: all of them reach our Outstanding band. Raw is the toughest company any food can keep on our scoring, and a typical raw food for growing dogs already earns that word. The story here is consistency, not daylight over the field. The nine also hold that band from top to bottom, so ranking is no help and you can pick on animals and appetite.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 50% (Drumsticks 30%, Gizzards 20%), Beef 30% (Trim 12.5%, Heart 10%, Liver 7.5%), Carrot 9.6%, Butternut Squash 2.5%, Broccoli 2.5%, Kale 2.5%, Flaxseed Meal 2%, Kelp Meal 0.2%, Cod Liver Oil 0.15%, Wheatgerm Oil 0.15%, Cranberries 0.15%, Blueberries 0.15%, Botanicals 0.1% (Turmeric, Spirulina Powder, Green Lipped Mussel Powder, Chicory Root Powder, Spinach Powder, Bilberry Powder, Gingko Biloba Powder).

The arithmetic repeats on every label. Four fifths of the bowl is animal, and the remaining fifth is vegetables with a short tail of extras. Where Able prints the full breakdown, carrot comes in at 9.6% with butternut squash, broccoli and kale at 2.5% apiece, then flaxseed meal at 2% and kelp meal at 0.2%. Some labels give that detail and others summarise, which is worth knowing if you like reading a list line by line.

Able uses working cuts. Drumsticks and ribs bring the bone, gizzards and hearts bring the harder-wearing muscle, and liver turns up in nearly every recipe. That mixture matters more for a growing dog than for a settled adult, because ground bone is where the calcium comes from when no mineral figure is printed.

You will not find a vitamin and mineral premix on these labels. Able's stated position is that whole ingredients cover the job: kelp for iodine, wheatgerm oil for vitamin E, cod liver oil for vitamin D, and the B vitamins arriving with the liver. The organ content is what makes that argument stand up. There is no dosed panel to read.

Cod liver oil does two jobs at once. It supplies vitamin D and omega 3 fats, and it also puts fish into every single recipe. Most dogs will never give it a thought. It only matters if fish is the thing you are steering around, because no version of this range leaves it out.

The botanical pinch is printed at 0.1% and holds turmeric, spirulina, green lipped mussel powder and a handful of berry and root powders. At that inclusion it is seasoning rather than supplementation, and printing the percentage is the honest way to present it. The cranberries and blueberries just above it sit at 0.15% and read the same way.

Carbohydrate is estimated by difference, so on a label with no starch anywhere the figure works as a sweeping-up of everything the analysis did not measure. Most recipes here come out low or at zero. The Beef and Lamb with Duck reads 35.4% of dry matter, and on a label like that the ingredients are the truer guide: meat and vegetables, plus a spoonful of extras.

Chicken at 50% arrives as drumsticks and gizzards and beef at 30% as trim, heart and liver, a tidy way to introduce red meat to a poultry-raised dog. At 183 kcal per 100g, few recipes in the range carry more energy.

Every recipe in the range is £6.05 a kilo. Single portions run from 150g to 500g, with multipack boxes of roughly 4kg to 5kg. Every recipe comes in a chunky grind or a non chunky one.

A growing dog's daily amount changes month by month, so there is no single figure worth pinning down. As a marker, the feeding estimate for a 20kg dog inside its first twelve months is 1000g to 1200g a day, against 400g to 600g for the same dog once grown.