Burns Grain-Free Adult/Senior: Duck & Potato review

The two varieties finish a whisker apart on our scale and settle together in our Average band, a step under the typical adult dry food. Nothing meaningful separates them in the bowl. Both are potato-led recipes with estimated carbohydrate at 60.5% and 61.0% of dry matter respectively, and both trade nutritional density for a rare degree of label discipline. Choose between them by protein, not by band.

Ingredients, as declared: Potato (48%), Buckwheat (27%), Dried Duck (19%), Duck Fat, Peas, Seaweed (0.5%), Minerals.

Potato leads at 48% in the duck recipe and 46% in the turkey, with buckwheat at 27% in both. Buckwheat is the interesting one. It is a gluten-free seed with no botanical link to wheat at all, and it carries a little more protein than most cereals. The grain-free promise holds on a technicality that favours the dog.

The meat is dried before weighing, 19% duck or 20% turkey, so the declared figures are concentrated ones you can take at face value. Crucially, the fat matches the meat in each recipe, duck fat with duck and turkey fat with turkey. That one decision is what makes these recipes usable for a strict single-protein plan, where many rivals quietly add chicken oil or fish oil and break the exclusivity.

Beyond that the list is nearly bare: peas in the duck version only, seaweed at 0.5% in both for trace minerals, and the mineral block. There are no berries, botanicals or garnish of any kind, which reads less like an omission and more like the point.

The additives continue the careful pattern. Taurine is dosed at 1000 mg per kilo, selenium arrives as selenised yeast rather than the commoner selenite, and copper, manganese and zinc are all amino acid chelates, the forms generally taken up best.

Duck at 19% dried with duck fat behind it, plus peas that the turkey version does not carry. Duck is where you go when the everyday meats have stopped working, and very few kibbles keep the whole animal side on duck from top to bottom the way this one does. Estimated carbohydrate here is 60.5% of dry matter.

£5.75 a kilo for either variety, with 2kg, 6kg and 12kg bags across the range. As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats 258 grams of the duck at about £1.49 a day, or 257 grams of the turkey at about £1.48. That works from about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).