Bella + Duke Adult Complete | Premium: Grass-Fed Beef review

Our Outstanding band covers all eight tubs, and it covers the typical adult raw recipe as well, because raw is the strongest company a bowl can keep. The evenness is what stands out here: one construction across eight animals. Every tub reads Outstanding on all four pillars. The itemised animal shares and the fully printed vitamin and trace element doses are doing a good deal of that work.

Ingredients, as declared: Grass-fed Beef 80% (beef meat 50%, beef tripe 14%, beef kidney 5%, beef liver 5%, beef trachea 3%, beef bone 3%), sustainable seasonal vegetables 17% (carrots 3.4%, sprouts 3.4%, broccoli 3.4%, cauliflower 3.4%, cabbage 3.4%), blueberries 1%, sustainable hand harvested organic Scottish kelp 1%, pure olive oil 0.2%, dried algae (Schizochytrium sp.) 0.1%, beet pulp 0.04%, minerals 0.04%.

The animal side is 80% in every tub, and Bella + Duke breaks it down rather than leaving it whole. Muscle meat, tripe, kidney, liver, trachea and bone each carry a percentage, so you can see exactly how much organ and how much bone is in the bowl. Tripe does much of the lifting across the range, and it is one of the more useful things a raw recipe can hold. It is rich and easy to digest, and dogs rarely refuse it.

The label calls the vegetables seasonal and then prints the split anyway: 17% divided into five equal 3.4% shares of carrots, sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, with blueberries at 1%. Naming and percentaging every plant is unusual, and it means the tub you buy in February is the tub you bought in June.

Scottish kelp at 1% brings iodine and a wide spread of trace minerals. Olive oil at 0.2% is a small but genuinely useful addition for skin and coat, and the dried algae at 0.1% is the omega 3 source. That last one earns more attention than its size suggests, because it lets the beef, lamb, turkey, duck and chicken tubs carry their omega 3 with no fish in the bowl at all.

The additive panel is printed in full, per kilo. Vitamin D3 runs at 400IU in most tubs and 350IU in the turkey and chicken, while the fish and salmon print none and lean on the fish itself. Vitamin E is 30mg, rising to 40mg in those two. The trace elements are iron at 5mg, zinc at 25mg, manganese at 25mg and copper at 0.75mg, with the turkey and chicken taking copper to 1.25mg and the fish tubs taking manganese to 35mg. Every one of them is a chelate of protein hydrolysates, a well absorbed form.

Across the eight, protein converts to between 41.3% and 64.7% of dry matter and fat to between 18.5% and 41.8%, a wide spread for one range that reflects how differently these animals behave. Carbohydrate is estimated between 5.4% and 8.8% of dry matter, close to the 5.0% raw food typically shows, with the vegetables and blueberries accounting for it. Bone sits at 2% or 3% in every tub and does the calcium work, though no calcium figure is printed.

Beef meat at 50% with tripe at 14%, kidney and liver at 5% each, trachea at 3% and bone at 3%, which makes beef the only animal in the tub. Fat converts to 38.7% of dry matter and energy is 147 kcal per 100g, so this is one of the richer recipes and portions run smaller than most.

Every tub is £5.74 a kilo. They come as 500g tubs, in subscription boxes of 4kg, 8kg, 12kg, 16kg and 20kg.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75), which lands a day's feeding between £3.11 and £5.61 depending on the tub. The rate per kilo never changes, so that spread is purely energy density: the lighter recipes feed in much bigger portions.