Alpha Spirit Realfood Complete: Chicken Stew review

Our scale separates them barely at all, with the pork stew alone in our Outstanding band and the other five reading Excellent, so there is no weak link to steer around inside the range. Excellent is the typical adult wet food's band word too, since the whole category does well with us. These stews still finish clear of that typical mark.

The reasons repeat across the six: animal content declared at 97%, a named animal opening every list, and dry matter analyses that leave next to nothing for carbohydrate. Nutritional balance and transparency read Outstanding right across the set, with protein and processing Excellent on five of the six and Outstanding on the pork.

Ingredients, as declared: 97% fresh chicken, natural meat sauces, peas, carrots, sweet potato, spices

97% fresh animal content is the constant across the range, and it is a high figure for any wet food. What sits behind it changes: chicken, duck with a little sweetbread, tuna, beef, plain pork, and pork ear cooked in its own sauce. Every list opens with the named animal, and the vegetables that follow are named too, usually peas, carrots and sweet potato.

The sauces are where the labels turn vague. Natural meat sauces turn up on four of the labels with no animal named. Most households will not mind. If your dog is on a strict elimination diet, that gap matters. The duck and the pork ear recipes are the exceptions, each keeping to a single named animal throughout.

Because the animal content is so high, the dry matter analyses read unusually meat-heavy. Protein converts to between 55.7% and 85.0% of dry matter depending which recipe you pick up, and estimated carbohydrate comes out at nothing at all on several of them. That is what a mostly-meat stew looks like once the water is taken out.

Fat is where the six really diverge. The tuna converts to 3.9% fat on a dry matter basis while the pork ear reaches 60.7%, with the rest sitting between. On the duck and the pork ear the declared fat is high enough that the panel does not quite balance once moisture is removed. Read those two dry matter conversions as close approximations.

Peas, carrots and sweet potato do the plant work, with pumpkin on the tuna recipe and potato starch on the duck. Nothing here is a filler. These are gentle, familiar vegetables in quantities small enough that they barely register in the analysis. Olive oil appears on the duck label as well, a genuinely good oil for coat condition.

The added panel is the same across the range and every entry carries a number. Vitamin A is 8011 IU per kilo, with vitamin D3 at 513 and vitamin E at 160. The minerals follow in milligrams: manganese and iron, then copper and zinc, and iodine. None of the six declares a calcium figure, so that one reading is missing from the picture.

Fresh chicken at 97% with peas, carrots and sweet potato behind it, and no carbohydrate left at all once the moisture is taken out. Protein converts to 63.3% of dry matter and fat to 31.7%, a comfortable middle reading for the range, and at 136 kcal per 100g portions are moderate. The natural meat sauces are not tied to an animal, so this recipe cannot be called chicken-only.

£13.09 a kilo across all six recipes, sold in a 280g pack singly or by the nine.

Daily feeding varies by recipe because their energy does. For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition on an assumed 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), the pork ear works out at about 507 grams a day and £6.64. The tuna is the lightest of the six, so it needs around 941 grams at £12.31. The other four fall between those two.