Basil's Dog Food: Beef review

All five chubs sit in our Outstanding band. Raw is the fiercest field we score and its typical adult recipe reaches that same band, so matching it five times across five different animals is the achievement here rather than towering over anything. There is barely a whisker between them, and every chub reads Outstanding for protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value, so the choice goes back to your dog's tastes.

Ingredients, as declared: 60% Beef Meat + Heart, 10% Ground Beef Bone, 30% Seasonal Vegetables.

The arithmetic never moves: 70% animal, 30% vegetables, no oils, no premixes, no botanical tail. On four of the five labels that animal share is a single species, divided between muscle meat, heart and either ground bone or ground carcass.

Bone does the calcium work throughout, appearing as ground beef bone, ground chicken carcass, ground lamb bone, duck carcass or venison bone. You can read it in the ash figures, with the beef at 13.2% of dry matter and the lamb at 12.2%. Both are well up on the lighter recipes, and that is what bone in the grind looks like on an analysis.

Liver is the one thing missing. Heart appears on four of the five labels and is superb muscle meat, but it is not offal in the nutritional sense. The vitamin A and copper that liver usually contributes are not on show here. For a dog eating a varied week it is a small detail, and it is worth registering all the same.

Seasonal vegetables is the loosest entry on the label, and at 30% of the chub it is not a small one. Broad plant terms let a recipe follow whatever is in the ground, which is precisely what seasonal means. The result is a label that describes its animals exactly and its plants by principle.

Carbohydrate is estimated by difference, and the spread it throws up is a product of that method. It runs 1.1% of dry matter on the lamb, 16.3% on the duck and lamb and 14.6% on the venison, against the 5.0% raw food usually shows. Read the ingredients list instead, since no starch ingredient appears anywhere beyond the vegetables.

The venison label carries a note that it may contain copper shot. That is the mark of meat taken in the field, and it is exactly the sort of line plenty of makers would quietly leave off.

Beef meat and heart lead at 60%, with ground beef bone at 10% behind them. It is the leanest of the five, fat converting to 25.3% of dry matter, and the lightest at 113 kcal per 100g, so portions run largest here. The ash reading of 13.2% of dry matter is that ground bone showing up on the analysis.

Every recipe is £3.34 a kilo and every chub is 400g. They are sold only inside a build-your-own box, in small, medium and large sizes holding 16, 32 and 48 chubs.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a day's feeding runs between £2.11 and £2.48. The lighter chubs feed in bigger portions, which is where that difference comes from.