AbleThrive Adult: Beef and Lamb with Duck review

Every one of the ten recipes earns our Outstanding band, and the spread between top and bottom stays inside that single word. Raw is the strongest field on our scoring by some distance, and a typical adult raw food already carries the Outstanding word. Matching it ten times in a row is the real result here, with no gap over the category. Protein and processing reads Outstanding on all ten labels and transparency Excellent on every one, while nutritional balance ranges from Good up to Outstanding and value reads Outstanding on every one of them.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef 47.5%, lamb 25% (including bone), duck 7.5% (including offal), carrot, butternut squash, broccoli, kale, flaxseed meal, kelp meal, cod liver oil, wheatgerm oil, cranberries, blueberries, turmeric, spirulina powder, green lipped mussel powder, chicory root powder, spinach powder, bilberry powder, gingko biloba powder.

The blueprint barely moves. Named animals lead, and carrot heads the vegetable fraction with butternut squash, broccoli and kale in behind. Flaxseed meal handles fibre and the omega fats. A short tail of kelp and oils and berries and botanicals closes the label. Change the animals and you have changed the recipe; everything else stays where it is.

The animal share is proper butchery. Bone rides in with drumsticks and ribs. Most labels name the liver and offal inside the meat figure, and it is the ground bone that supplies calcium, since no mineral panel is printed anywhere in the range. Nine of the ten put 80% animal in the bowl; only the Lamb and Turkey with Beef sits lower, at 75%.

There is no added vitamin and mineral premix. Able states that kelp meets the iodine requirement, wheatgerm oil supplies vitamin E, cod liver oil supplies vitamin D and the B vitamins come with the liver. As whole-food reasoning goes it hangs together, and the organ meats in every recipe are what give it credibility. It does mean you are taking the micronutrition on the description, with no panel to read it off.

Cod liver oil is doing the vitamin D work and adding omega 3 fats at the same time, and it also means fish is present in all ten recipes. That is a small thing for most dogs and a decisive one for a few. If fish is what you are avoiding, no version of this range will serve.

A trace-level list of character ingredients closes the label: gingko biloba, bilberry, spinach, chicory root, green lipped mussel powder, spirulina and turmeric, with cranberries and blueberries just above them. Green lipped mussel has a joint-care reputation, and at this inclusion it is a nod towards that. The printed percentages make that plain.

Carbohydrate is an estimate arrived at by difference, and on labels with nothing starchy anywhere it collects everything the analysis did not measure. Most of the ten come out low and two of them at zero. The Beef and Lamb with Duck is the one that runs high, at 35.4% of dry matter, and there the ingredients list is the honest guide to what is actually in the bowl.

Protein and fat land close together at 29.1% and 28.3% of dry matter, on the lowest declared moisture in the range at 54.0%. Beef leads at 47.5% with lamb at 25% bringing bone and duck at 7.5% bringing offal, and the 35.4% carbohydrate estimate is what by-difference maths produces from a label with no starch on it.

Every recipe is £7.25 a kilo. The range comes in multipack boxes only, running from 150g portions in a box of 28 up to 500g portions in a box of 10, with box weights between roughly 4kg and 5kg.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, a day's feeding works out at between 444g and 677g, or between £3.22 and £4.91. The basis is about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The spread follows energy density. Every recipe costs the same per kilo, and the lighter ones simply feed in bigger portions.