Bonacibo Pouches: Adult Chicken & Beef review

Both pouches finish in our Average band while the typical adult wet food finishes up in our Excellent band, so there is genuine ground between them. Reading the two labels shows where it opens up. Meat and animal derivatives at 82% in the adult pouch sounds generous. The term stretches to any warm blooded land animal in any proportion, and only 4% of chicken and 4% of beef are actually promised. Add vegetable protein extracts, which fold plant protein into the same printed figure as meat protein, and there is not a great deal for our scoring to hold on to. The analysis itself is unremarkable rather than alarming: protein at 38.9% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate at 22.8% in the adult pouch, protein at 40.0% and fat at 35.0% in the puppy. Protein and processing reads Average on both pouches, while nutritional balance reads Excellent in the adult and Outstanding in the puppy. Transparency reads Excellent then Good, and all of that describes the label, not the meal.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives [82% (from chicken no less than 4%, from beef no less than 4%)], Cereals (Wheat Flour), Vegetable Protein Extracts, Vitamins, Minerals.

Meat and animal derivatives is the entry doing the heavy lifting on both pouches, at 82% in the adult and 73% in the puppy. It is a legal category term for the fleshy parts and processing derivatives of warm blooded land animals. That means it can hold anything from prime cuts to the least appealing offcuts, and it can be composed differently from batch to batch. Chicken and beef are each promised at no less than 4%, and that is the whole of what the label commits to.

The cereal is named, which deserves credit, because most labels of this kind stop at the word cereals. Wheat flour is what it is: an inexpensive, workable starch that most dogs handle without trouble. It is also one of the grains most often behind a food intolerance, so a dog with a wheat history should give these a miss.

Vegetable protein extracts follow. The term does not say which plant or how the protein was pulled out of it, and for a dog these proteins are not the equal of the ones in meat. Their practical effect is to lift the printed protein figure without lifting the quality of it.

The added panels are the strongest part of both labels, and they are dosed line by line rather than merely listed. Taurine is there at 233 mg/kg in the adult pouch and 860 mg/kg in the puppy, with choline chloride, glycine, folic acid and the trace elements each carrying a figure. The selenium is the standard sodium selenite, as on most labels.

Neither pouch prints its calories, so the energy shown on this page is our own estimate from the analysis. Moisture sits at 82% in the adult pouch and 80% in the puppy, which is what a pouch is for, and it is also why the daily count of them runs high.

The adult pouch leads with meat and animal derivatives at 82%, the bigger animal declaration of the two, with wheat flour and vegetable protein extracts behind it. It is the lighter pouch at an estimated 73 kcal per 100g, and its estimated carbohydrate is the higher of the pair at 22.8% of dry matter.

Both the adult pouch and the puppy pouch hold 100 g.

As a guide, an adult dog of 15kg in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at roughly 1154 grams of the adult pouch, more than ten pouches in a day. Fed as the whole diet these suit a small dog far better than a big one, and plenty of owners use them as a topper over a dry food instead.