Acana Classics: Red Meat review

All three varieties land in our Good band, level with the typical adult dry food. Transparency reads Outstanding on all three, which is the label earning its keep. The meats are named and weighted, the produce is itemised instead of lumped together, and the additive panel is printed in full down to the preservatives.

Value sits in step with the overall band, and nutritional balance reads Good because the analysis is solid without being striking. Carbohydrate comes in under what a typical dry food carries without going anywhere near low, and the same protein and fat figures appear on all three bags. What you get in return is consistency, which counts for a great deal in a food a dog eats twice a day for years.

Ingredients, as declared: Raw beef (16%), lamb meal (15%), pearled barley, whole peas, oat groats, pork fat (8%), pork meal (8%), whole oats, chickpea fibre, raw pork (2%), fish oil (1%), potassium chloride, dried kelp, salt, dried chicory root, fresh whole pumpkin, fresh whole butternut squash, fresh whole carrots, fresh whole apples, fresh whole pears, fresh whole zucchini, fresh kale, fresh spinach, fresh turnip greens, fresh beet greens, whole cranberries, whole blueberries, whole saskatoon berries, turmeric, milk thistle, burdock root, lavender, marshmallow root, rosehips.

Every recipe opens with a raw or fresh meat and backs it with a meal from the same family, which is the right way round. Prairie Poultry gives fresh chicken at 21% with chicken meal at 20%. Red Meat opens with raw beef at 16% and lamb meal at 15%, and Wild Coast puts raw salmon at 22% ahead of herring meal at 19%. The meal is the part carrying most of the finished kibble, because the raw share loses its water in the oven, and in each case that meal is named right down to the species.

Pearled barley, oat groats and whole oats supply the starch, with whole peas and chickpea fibre working alongside them. These are slower, gentler grains than the wheat and maize a kibble often reaches for, and barley in particular brings useful fibre with it. Carbohydrate lands between 36.3% and 36.9% of dry matter, under the 46.2% typical of adult dry food, and crude fibre reads a healthy 5.7%.

The produce list is long and mostly whole, running from pumpkin, butternut squash and carrots through apples and pears to kale, spinach and beet greens, then cranberries, blueberries and saskatoon berries. Most of it is seasoning at trace level, and the recipe does not depend on any of it. The entries doing real work are dried kelp, a natural iodine source, and dried chicory root, whose inulin feeds the friendly bacteria in the gut.

The additive panel is unusually forthcoming. Taurine is dosed at 400 mg per kilo on all three, and choline chloride at 700 mg in the poultry and red meat recipes and 350 mg in Wild Coast. A live probiotic culture of Enterococcus faecium is declared on every bag. Preservation is handled by tocopherol extract from vegetable oils, with rosemary extract behind it and nothing synthetic in sight.

Fish oil at 1% runs through the whole range as the omega 3 source. It is a genuinely good ingredient and the one you want for skin and joints. It does mean the poultry and red meat recipes carry fish as well, which is the detail to hold on to if fish is what you are trying to keep out.

The busiest label of the three, with raw beef at 16%, lamb meal at 15%, pork meal at 8% and raw pork at 2%, and pork fat supplying the added fat. That mixture makes it the most varied bowl in the range and the least useful for narrowing a diet down to one animal. Calcium is the highest here at 1.82% of dry matter, which is the figure to weigh if a large breed puppy is being fed from this bag.

Prairie Poultry is £5.88 a kilo, with Red Meat and Wild Coast at £6.70, and all three come in 2kg and 9.7kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at roughly 244 to 245 grams a day, which comes to between £1.43 and £1.64 a day depending on the bag. That takes a daily requirement of about 840 kcal, worked from the usual maintenance formula of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. The label's own table is more sparing, at 120 to 195 grams for a dog between 10kg and 20kg taking an hour or less of exercise. Let the waistline settle the difference between the two.