Bella + Duke Adult Complete | Working Dog: Sustainable Salmon review

Every tub in this line carries our Outstanding word, which happens to be the word the adult raw field earns as a whole, and that tells you how high the bar already sits. Lifting the animal share to 85% and trimming the plants keeps the range at the top end of what we see. Protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value all read Outstanding across the eight. The eight are packed too closely for the order to matter, so choose on the animal.

Ingredients, as declared: Sustainable Salmon (MSC) 33% (salmon meat 31%, salmon bone 2%), grass-fed beef 28% (beef tripe 15%, beef kidney 5%, beef liver 5%, beef trachea 3%), duck 24% (duck meat 21%, duck heart 2%, duck bone 1%), sustainable seasonal vegetables 12% (carrots 2.4%, sprouts 2.4%, broccoli 2.4%, cauliflower 2.4%, cabbage 2.4%), blueberries 1%, sustainable hand harvested organic Scottish kelp 1%, psyllium husk 0.4%, pure olive oil 0.2%, dried algae (Schizochytrium sp.) 0.1%, beet pulp 0.04%, minerals 0.04%.

The animal share is 85% and it is broken out entry by entry, with muscle meat, tripe, kidney, liver, trachea and bone each given a percentage. Tripe is prominent right across the range, which suits a hard-working dog, being rich, highly digestible and almost never turned down.

Vegetables come down to 12%, an equal 2.4% each for carrots, sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. Blueberries add another 1%. The label calls them seasonal and then prints the split anyway, so there is no guessing about what is in the tub.

Kelp at 1% covers iodine and trace minerals, olive oil at 0.2% looks after skin and coat, and dried algae at 0.1% supplies the omega 3. Because that algae is not a fish oil, the land-meat tubs stay clear of fish altogether.

The additive panel is printed per kilo rather than hidden behind a blanket line. Vitamin D3 is 400IU in most tubs and 350IU in the turkey and chicken, with none printed on the fish and salmon; vitamin E is 30mg, or 40mg in those two. Iron is 5mg, zinc 25mg, manganese 25mg and copper 0.75mg, with copper at 1.25mg in the turkey and chicken and manganese at 35mg in the fish recipes. They are chelated forms, which dogs absorb well.

The analyses stay meat-shaped throughout. Protein converts to between 46.5% and 63.6% of dry matter and fat to between 20.1% and 40.9%. The carbohydrate estimate never leaves the 4.8% to 7.2% band, right on the 5.0% raw food usually shows. Bone runs at 1% to 3% depending on the recipe and is where the calcium comes from, though no figure for it is printed anywhere.

Salmon is MSC certified and leads at 33%, with beef at 28% and duck at 24% behind it. Psyllium husk at 0.4% adds soluble fibre. Fat converts to 31.8% of dry matter and it feeds at 129 kcal per 100g.

Every recipe is £4.62 a kilo, sold as 500g tubs, with subscription boxes at 4kg, 8kg, 12kg, 16kg and 20kg.

Feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition takes roughly 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75), which works out between £2.47 and £4.13 a day across the eight. Every tub is the same per kilo, so the difference is entirely how densely each one feeds.