AbleThrive Puppy: Lamb and Turkey with Beef review

Each of the six carries our Outstanding band, and they finish so close together that the ranking tells you nothing useful. Worth knowing what that band means in raw: this is the strongest category on our scoring, and a typical raw food for growing dogs earns the same word. The six are matching an exceptional field, not pulling away from it. Protein and processing reads Outstanding on all six and transparency Excellent throughout, nutritional balance reaches Outstanding on four of them, and value reads Outstanding across the range.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef 55% (including liver), lamb 10% (including bone), turkey 15%, 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.

Every label runs to the same order. Animals lead and the vegetables follow with carrot in front. Flaxseed meal covers fibre and omega fats. Kelp and the oils, then berries and botanicals, make up the tail. Six recipes on one structure, with the animals as the only real variable.

The meat share includes bone and offal, both counted inside it. That is how a raw label ought to read. The bone comes in on drumsticks and ribs. Hearts and gizzards bring the working muscle. Liver is on nearly every label, and it carries a good deal of the micronutrition on its own.

No synthetic vitamin blend is added anywhere. Able names kelp as the iodine source, wheatgerm oil as the vitamin E, cod liver oil as the vitamin D and the liver as the B vitamins. Every recipe is built so those ingredients are present. It is whole-food thinking, and the trade is that nothing is printed as a dose you can check.

Cod liver oil is worth pausing on, because it makes all six fish-containing recipes. Most young dogs will take that as a bonus, given what the oil brings with it. For a household steering around fish, it is the detail that decides the matter before flavour does.

The finishing ingredients are deliberately light. Towards the back of each list sit cranberries and blueberries, and behind them a few more berry and root powders alongside spirulina, turmeric and green lipped mussel powder. Green lipped mussel carries a joint-care reputation, and this far down a list it is a gesture in that direction.

The carbohydrate line is arrived at by difference, so on a starch-free list it quietly collects everything the analysis did not account for. Two of the six come out at zero on a dry matter basis. Where a figure sits higher than the ingredients suggest, read the list.

The widest cast of the six, with beef at 55% bringing the liver, turkey at 15% and lamb at 10% bringing the bone. At 187 kcal per 100g nothing here is more concentrated. The 22.9% dry matter carbohydrate estimate is arithmetic left over from the analysis, with no starch on the label.

All six recipes are £7.25 a kilo. They come as multipack boxes, from 150g portions packed in 28 through to 500g portions packed in 10, with box weights of roughly 4kg to 5kg.

Daily amounts for a growing dog climb and then settle, so a single figure would not hold for long. For scale, a 30kg dog in its first twelve months has a feeding estimate of 1500g to 1800g a day, and 600g to 900g once it is grown.