Alpha Spirit Soft Food Complete Multi Protein review

Our reading puts this recipe in the Excellent band, with transparency and nutritional balance both Outstanding, value in step at Excellent and protein and processing at Good. No corner of it is weak, and no single strength is carrying the rest. Semi-moist is a small enough corner of the market that there is no crowd of rivals to line it up against, so the band is doing the talking on its own here.

What earns it is straightforward enough. Animal ingredients occupy the entire top of the list, every entry carries a percentage beside it, and the supplement doses are printed as figures on the panel. Those are exactly the habits our scoring is built to notice.

Ingredients, as declared: 35% fresh chicken meat, 20% fresh whole fish (arsenal (Sardinella aurita), mackerel (Scomber scombrus), horse mackerel (Trachurus spp.), sardine (Sardina pilchardus)), 15% fresh pork, 10% fresh duck, 5% fresh pork liver, 9% hydrolysed starch, 1.5% vegetable glycerine (USP), 1% eggs, 1% Beta Vulgaris pulp, 0.75% brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), 0.25% pumpkin, 0.25% banana,0.25% pineapple, 0.25% cumin (Cuminum cyminum), 0.25% sage (Salvia officinalis), 0.25% ginger (Zingiber officinale), 0.25% turmeric (Curcuma longa)

Semi-moist keeps roughly a quarter of its weight as water, declared at 25% here, which is why the pieces stay yielding rather than brittle. It also means a fresh-meat headline survives the making of the food far better than it would in an extruded biscuit. The analysis backs that up, with protein converting to 38.7% of dry matter and fat to 20.0%. Estimated carbohydrate sits at 29.3%, and it comes from the starch and the glycerine.

The meat roll call is unusually broad for one recipe. Fresh chicken leads at 35%, with 15% pork and 10% duck behind it, three birds and a pig with genuinely different fat and flavour profiles. Pork remains a comparatively uncommon meat in British bowls, so for a dog that has worked its way through the usual poultry it brings something new. The 5% fresh pork liver is the smallest animal entry and arguably the busiest, since liver carries vitamin A, B12 and copper at concentrations no muscle cut approaches.

Whole fish at 20% is named down to the species: sardinella, mackerel, horse mackerel and sardine. Using the whole fish rather than a trimmed fillet brings bone and soft organ along with the flesh, and that is where much of a fish's mineral content actually sits. Horse mackerel deserves a word of reassurance, since it is a fish like the other three and has nothing whatever to do with horses.

Holding a soft food together takes a binder, and 9% hydrolysed starch does that job while arriving already broken down for easier digestion. Which plant it began life as goes unsaid, the one loose thread in a list that otherwise pins a figure to everything. Vegetable glycerine at 1.5% is what stops the pieces drying out on the shelf, and the label specifies pharmaceutical grade for it.

The tail of the list is small but deliberate. Beet pulp at 1% brings gentle fermentable fibre, eggs at the same 1% add protein a dog uses very efficiently, and brewer's yeast at 0.75% is a natural store of B vitamins. After that come pumpkin, banana and pineapple, then cumin, sage, ginger and turmeric, every one of them at 0.25%. That is seasoning territory, and it makes no meaningful nutritional contribution.

The added panel is where this label gets interesting. Taurine at 2680 mg is a heart-supporting amino acid you see far more often in cat food, glucosamine at 3930 mg is aimed squarely at cartilage, and iron follows at 62 mg. Printed figures tell you far more than a bare ingredient name does, and all three are printed.

£6.72 a kilo, in bags of 1.5kg, 3kg and 9kg.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works through around 254 grams a day, based on about 840 kcal a day from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That comes to roughly £1.71 a day.