Bakers Puppy review

This one comes out in our Poor band, some way under the Good band a typical puppy kibble reaches, with protein and processing reading Poor and nutritional balance no better than Average.

The reason has less to do with any one ingredient than with how little the label commits to. The animal content, the grain, the fats and the vegetable protein are all described by category, never by name. A recipe written that way can be altered from batch to batch without a word of the list changing. That leaves an owner unable to say what their pup ate last month, let alone whether it agreed with them.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals (wholegrains 49%), Meat and animal derivatives (of which 4% chicken), Derivatives of vegetable origin (of which 2.9% dried beet pulp), Oils and fats, Glycerol, Vegetable protein extracts, Minerals, Vegetables* (of which 0.3% dried pea and 0.3% dried carrot), Spirulina* (0.2%), *natural ingredients, equivalent to 4% rehydrated vegetables

Cereals at 49% is the largest entry, and the word covers everything from an excellent grain to a very poor one. Some makers use it to keep a formula to themselves, others so they can move between grain sources as supply changes. Either way, the owner cannot tell which grain is in the bowl.

Meat and animal derivatives comes next, with 4% of the recipe declared as chicken. In law the term takes in the fleshy parts of slaughtered land animals along with the products of processing a carcass. That spans a wide range of quality, and this label does not say where in that range it sits. Beyond the named chicken, the animal content cannot be pinned to a species.

The same pattern turns up in three more places. Derivatives of vegetable origin, oils and fats, and vegetable protein extracts all describe a class of material rather than an ingredient. Dried beet pulp at 2.9% is named inside the first of them and is a useful, well tolerated fibre, but the rest of that space is left open.

Glycerol sits fairly high on the list. It is a sweet, syrupy carbohydrate whose job is to keep a kibble soft and appealing. Glycerol is one reason the carbohydrate estimate reaches 48.9% of dry matter while protein stops at 27.2%.

The named good things come right at the end and in small amounts: dried pea and dried carrot at 0.3% each and spirulina at 0.2%, which the label notes as equivalent to 4% rehydrated vegetables. Peas and carrots are genuinely worth having in a diet, but at these levels treat them as a flourish rather than a plank of the nutrition.

The declared analysis reads protein 25.0%, fat 12.0%, fibre 3.0%, ash 7.0% and moisture 8.0%. The maker declares energy at 357 kcal per 100g, where a puppy dry food typically carries 376. There is no calcium figure anywhere, which in a food sold for growth is the omission that matters most, and no large breed claim can rest on a number the label never prints.

The vitamin and trace element panel is dosed in print, with selenium supplied as sodium selenite. That is the standard mineral form across the industry, though the yeast bound version is better taken up by the dog.

Sold in 1.1kg, 2.85kg and 12.5kg bags.

What a pup needs at ten weeks is nothing like what the same pup needs at six months. Follow the stage by stage guide on the pack, and let your hands over their ribs settle any argument about the amount.