Bulmer Pet Foods Bulmer Complete Raw 80/10/10: Duck review

We have not put a figure against this range. The reason sits on the labels, not in the food. A complete raw recipe is assessed on what it declares, and the declaration here is a single line: the ratio, the animals, nothing further. There is no breakdown of cuts, no naming of the organs, no vitamin or mineral panel and no calcium reading, and three of the eight chubs arrive with no ingredients line whatsoever. The calorie figures are our estimates as well, since the maker publishes none.

None of that makes this a lesser bowl of food. The ratio Bulmer works to is exactly the one experienced raw feeders ask for, and the analyses read the way meat, bone and offal should read. The whole set is free of the fillers that a scoring system usually has to argue with. There is simply not enough on the page for us to place it fairly against a raw field where most makers itemise every gram. So we have set out what is declared and left the ranking alone.

The arithmetic is the same on every chub: 80% meat, 10% bone, 10% offal, adding up to a single named line of ingredients. That ratio is the raw feeder's shorthand for a whole prey animal. The ground bone supplies the calcium that a cooked food would take from a mineral premix, and the offal share carries the vitamins and trace elements that muscle meat alone runs short of.

Two chubs keep to one animal from start to finish, the Chicken and the Rabbit, and both say so on the label at 100%. Rabbit is the interesting one. Plenty of dogs have never met it, because it turns up so rarely in dog food. That makes it worth reaching for when the everyday meats have caused trouble.

Tripe turns up in three chubs, alongside beef, chicken and duck. It is the stomach of grazing animals, and it is unusually digestible as well as rich in protein and fat. The smell is pungent in a way that dogs adore and owners tolerate. If your dog picks at its dinner, a tripe blend is the usual answer.

There is no added premix anywhere in the range and no oils either, so the micronutrition rests entirely on the offal and the bone. That is a legitimate way to build a raw recipe, and it is how most 80/10/10 makers work, but it does mean the offal is carrying real responsibility. Since the labels do not say which organs go in, it is worth a quick note to Bulmer if this is going to be your dog's whole diet, so you know exactly what is arriving.

The analyses read the way an all-animal recipe should. Protein converts to between 42.1% and 65.5% of dry matter, fat to between 33.7% and 38.3%, and the carbohydrate estimate comes out at zero on every chub except the Rabbit. That one reads 12.8% of dry matter. Since nothing starchy appears on the label, that figure is the arithmetic sweeping up whatever the analysis did not measure.

Calories throughout are estimated from the analysis rather than printed by the maker, and they move about more than the labels suggest, from 134 to 184 kcal per 100g. Portion by eye and by waistline for the first fortnight when you swap between chubs, because the same scoop does not carry the same energy.

Another chub arriving without a published ingredients list. On the analysis it is the lightest of the eight at 134 kcal per 100g, with fat converting to 33.8% of dry matter and protein to 62.0%. Portions run largest here, and a dog watching its waistline does well on it.

Every chub is £5.29 a kilo, whichever animal is inside. Each chub is 454 grams, and they are sold singly or in boxes of 20 subject to availability.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a day lands between £2.42 on the Rabbit and £3.31 on the Duck. The per kilo figure never moves, so that spread is energy density alone: the lighter chubs feed in bigger portions. Those calorie figures are estimates, and the daily numbers are a guide only.