Briantos Essentials Adult: Poultry review

Our Poor band is where both varieties finish, well short of the Good band the typical adult dry food manages. The driver is transparency more than anything measured in the analysis: with only categories on the list, neither we nor you can say which animals, grains or fats are in a given bag. Nothing in the analysis is alarming: protein sits at 22.8% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate at 52.7%. Plenty of dogs eat foods like this happily; it simply offers no way to know exactly what they are eating.

Ingredients, as declared: Grains, meat and animal by-products (including 4% poultry), vegetable by-products, oils and fats (including 0.5% salmon oil), minerals.

Category labelling is the story here. Meat and animal by-products can mean any mix of species and parts that meets the legal definition, and the 4% named animal is the only fixed point within it. The same goes for the unnamed grains and for the umbrella term oils and fats.

The one specific ingredient beyond the headline animal is salmon oil at 0.5%, a genuinely useful source of omega 3s and the reason the recipe cannot be called fish free in either variety.

The additive panel is short but complete, covering vitamins A, D3 and E plus the required trace minerals, each with its dose printed. The selenium comes as sodium selenite, the standard inorganic form, and the zinc and iron are supplied as simple sulphates.

With moisture undeclared we assume the kibble standard of 8% to build the dry-matter figures, and the calorie figure is our estimate too, so treat both as guides rather than declarations.

Here the named 4% is poultry, a family of birds and not one species. Even this variety's one fixed point could be chicken, turkey or another bird, and the salmon oil still brings a trace of fish.

The Fish variety is £3.32 a kilo and the Poultry £2.98, each sold in a 600g bag.

On the standard maintenance allowance of about 840 kcal for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75), both come out near 256 grams a day. That is £0.85 daily on the Fish and £0.76 on the Poultry.