Alpha Sporting Puppy Wheat Gluten Free review

Our Good band is where this label comes out, level with the typical puppy dry food. No single entry decides this reading. Protein and processing comes out Average, nutritional balance and value both read Good, and transparency Excellent.

Three things account for most of it. The meat at the top of the list names a category instead of a species. Maize gluten meal is lifting the protein figure with plant protein, and the calcium line a growth food is judged on never appears. None of that stops it filling a busy pup, and the notes below set out what the recipe does bring.

Ingredients, as declared: Poultry Meal (28.0%), White Rice (26.0%), Whole Maize, Poultry Oil, Maize Gluten Meal, Sugar Beet Pellets, Fish Meal, Whole Linseed (2.5%), Brewers Yeast, Salmon Oil, Chicory Root Extract (as a source of Prebiotic FOS) (0.3%), Extract of Yucca Schidigera.

Poultry meal at 28.0% is the biggest single entry and it is a dried meat, so it has already lost its water and carries into the finished kibble much as printed. The catch is the word poultry itself, which covers any domestic fowl and lets the bird change between batches. For a household that simply wants meat protein that is fine, but anyone tracing an intolerance needs the species named, and here it is not.

White rice at 26.0% and whole maize behind it form the starch base. Rice is one of the gentler cereals for a dog to digest and is a sensible choice in a puppy food, while maize sits further from what most owners are looking for. Carbohydrate is estimated at 36.5% as fed and 40.1% of dry matter, a shade above the 39.0% typical, so this is a starch-forward recipe by design.

Maize gluten meal deserves a mention of its own. It is a by-product of maize processing, used to top up the protein figure in place of meat, and plant protein does not serve a growing dog as usefully as animal protein does. Read the declared 29.0% protein with that in mind, because part of it is coming from the maize rather than the bird.

The back half of the list is more encouraging. Fish meal brings marine amino acids and minerals, and whole linseed at 2.5% and salmon oil add omega 3 fats for coat and brain. Brewers yeast contributes B vitamins, and sugar beet pellets provide fibre, though crude fibre still only reaches 2.0%. Chicory root extract at 0.3% is named specifically as the FOS source, and yucca extract closes the list.

The additive panel names vitamins A and D3 and prints vitamin E at 110 mg per kilo. The trace elements are itemised too: zinc at 100 mg, iron at 60 mg, manganese at 25 mg, copper at 5.00 mg, iodine at 1.00 mg and selenium at 0.15 mg. The selenium comes as sodium selenite, the more common of the two supplement forms permitted here. What the panel does not carry is calcium, and on a puppy food offered from toy to giant that is the one figure a big breed owner most needs. The maker is the place to ask for it.

£3.00 a kilo, sold in 3kg and 15kg bags.

Growth feeding is a sliding scale, and this label spells that out: from 30g a day for the smallest pups up to 790g at the top of its chart for one heading towards 45kg. Start at whichever line your pup sits on now and move up as the weeks go by.