Chudleys Puppy / Junior review

Our Good band is where Chudleys Puppy / Junior comes to rest, level with the typical puppy dry food, and protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value all return Good. The recipe is doing sensible things. A partly named meat meal heads the list, the supplement tail is thoughtful, and the grains are declared as whole rather than as fractions, which keeps more of what is in them. What pulls the reading down is the balance, with carbohydrate at 44.2% of dry matter and a poultry meal that stops short of naming everything inside it.

Ingredients, as declared: Poultry meal (min 14% chicken and 14% duck), Whole grain maize, Prairie meal, Whole grain barley, Chicken fat, Whole grain oats, Hydrolysed chicken proteins, Peas, Unmolassed beet pulp, Full fat linseed, Egg powder, Salmon oil (source of omega 3 fatty acids), Yeast (source of mannan oligosaccharides, 2,000mg/kg), Minerals, Seaweed, Marine algae (source of omega 3 fatty acid DHA), Glucosamine, Green lipped mussel, Blackcurrant, Rosemary, Pomegranate, Rosehips, Yucca schidigera, Beetroot

Poultry meal opens the list with chicken at a minimum of 14% and duck at a minimum of 14% named inside it. A bare poultry declaration usually tells you a good deal less. Meal is a concentrated form that has lost its water before mixing, and that share carries well into the finished kibble. What the wording does not do is account for the rest of the poultry, which could be any domestic fowl the maker has to hand.

The base is grain-led and openly so: whole grain maize, whole grain barley and whole grain oats, with prairie meal among them as the one entry left unexplained. Whole grain forms hold on to more of their nutrients than refined fractions do, and that counts in the recipe's favour. Carbohydrate still converts to 44.2% of dry matter where a typical puppy kibble runs at 39.0%.

Protein reads 28.0%, or 30.8% of dry matter, and fat 14.0%, or 15.4%, with our energy estimate at 358 kcal per 100g against the 376 typical for a puppy dry food. That makes for a moderate, steady sort of bowl rather than a rich one, which suits a pup on regular meals and plenty of exercise.

Hydrolysed chicken proteins, peas, full fat linseed and egg powder fill in the middle of the list, and the fats come from chicken fat with salmon oil behind them. Marine algae is added specifically for DHA, the fatty acid that matters most to brain and eye development in young animals. Putting it in deliberately is a thoughtful touch.

The rest of the tail is generous for a food of this type: yeast supplying mannan-oligosaccharides with its dose printed, then seaweed, glucosamine, green lipped mussel, blackcurrant, pomegranate, rosehips, beetroot and yucca. Only the prebiotic carries a stated amount, so the joint entries are best read as support included, with no measured dose behind them.

Calcium is missing from the analysis, and in a growth food it is the hardest working figure of the lot. Ash converts to 6.6% of dry matter, which suggests a modest overall mineral load, but it tells you nothing about the calcium inside it. With the maker offering this food across every adult size, anyone rearing a large or giant puppy has good reason to ask for the number before committing to it as the only bowl.

£3.13 a kilo, sold as a 2.5kg bag, a 2.7kg bucket or a 12kg sack.

How much a growing dog eats changes almost weekly. Read the chart on the pack against your pup's weight today and the adult they are heading towards. Come back to it every few weeks, because they will not stay this size for long.