Bella + Duke Puppy Complete | Working Dog: Sustainable Fish review

Outstanding is the band for every recipe here, and the typical raw puppy food holds it too. On our scoring, the raw field is the hardest to keep up with. The real achievement is holding that standard seven times over, with barely anything between the seven. Every tub reads Outstanding for protein and processing, and again for nutritional balance and transparency. Let your puppy's tastes and any species you are steering around make the decision.

Ingredients, as declared: Sustainable White Fish (MSC) 35% (white fish meat 33%, white fish bone 2%), grass-fed beef 30% (beef tripe 17%, beef kidney 5%, beef liver 5%, beef trachea 3%), chicken 25% (chicken meat 24%, chicken bone 1%), sustainable seasonal vegetables 7% (carrots 1.4%, sprouts 1.4%, broccoli 1.4%, cauliflower 1.4%, cabbage 1.4%), 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 recipe keeps the same shape whichever animal is on the lid. Named meat and organ with ground bone make up 90%. Seasonal vegetables take 7%, broken out at 1.4% each as carrots, sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage, then blueberries and hand harvested Scottish kelp take 1% apiece. Olive oil at 0.2%, dried algae at 0.1% and a whisper of beet pulp and minerals at 0.04% each close the list. Nothing hides under a vague heading.

The animal share is working cuts rather than fillet. Tripe, kidney, liver, trachea and heart appear across the range, and tripe is the stomach of grazing animals, rich stuff that dogs digest easily and rarely refuse. Liver brings vitamin A and copper, plus the B vitamins a growing dog leans on. That is why it appears in most of the seven.

Ground bone is on every label, running from 1% to 3% depending on the animal, and in a raw recipe that bone is where the calcium comes from. What is missing is a calcium percentage, since none of the seven prints one. There is a small declared addition per kilo behind it: vitamin D3 at 350 to 400 IU on the land recipes and vitamin E at 30 to 40mg. Iron, zinc, manganese and copper are supplied as chelates. For most puppies that is fine detail, but an owner planning to feed a large breed puppy on this alone should ask for the calcium figure first.

Kelp is doing the iodine job that a mineral premix would otherwise cover. The dried algae, Schizochytrium, is a cultivated source of the long chain omega 3 fats that fish oil usually supplies. That gets them into recipes naming no fish at all. Olive oil at 0.2% is a small finishing fat with a good reputation for coat condition.

Carbohydrate is worked out by difference and lands between 3.0% and 6.0% of dry matter across the seven, against 3.2% for the typical raw puppy food. With no cereal, no potato and no legume anywhere on the list, most of that figure is simply the estimate sweeping up whatever the analysis does not measure.

Three animals share this one: MSC white fish at 35%, beef at 30% as tripe and organs, and chicken at 25%. Protein converts to 65.8% of dry matter with ash the lowest in the range at 7.7%, and it runs to 97 kcal per 100g.

£7.00 a kilo across all seven recipes. They come as 500g tubs, and Bella + Duke also builds subscription boxes at 4kg, 8kg, 12kg, 16kg and 20kg.

Energy runs from 91 to 145 kcal per 100g across the range, so the same weight of food covers a different number of meals depending on which animal you pick.