Country Pursuit Muesli Moist Mix review

Our scoring rewards a label that names its animals, puts meat ahead of cereal and prints its own workings, and this one picks up credit on part of that and little on the rest. Protein and processing reads Average and nutritional balance Poor, while transparency reads Excellent, and the whole lands in our Average band.

Semi-moist mixers have no cohort of their own to be placed against, so what you are reading is the food's own measure rather than a ranking in a field. Take the band as a description of how the label is written and how much of the bowl is grain. It is not a warning about the dinner. A dog that is settled and shiny on this is doing nothing wrong at all.

Ingredients, as declared: Wheat 36%, Protein Pellets containing Beef Meat Meal 20%, Maize 15%, Barley 15%, Peas, Meat Pieces, Glucose, Poultry Oil.

Muesli mixes sit at the dry end of the semi-moist family, and the moisture figure says so: 8.0% declared, which is kibble territory. The pieces are soft and flaked, not damp. The bag stores and pours exactly like a dry food. Kennels have used mixes like this for decades, in large part for that reason.

Wheat is far and away the biggest single entry at 36%, with maize and barley at 15% apiece behind it. The carbohydrate estimate of 55.5%, converting to 60.4% of dry matter, follows straight on from that. Wheat is the cereal named most often when a dog turns out to be grain sensitive, so it is the one to know about here. Barley reads rather better: once cooked it digests easily, and it brings useful fibre and trace minerals along with it. Peas further down are whole peas. They bring fibre and antioxidants, plus a little of their own plant protein.

Beef meat meal at 20% arrives inside the protein pellets. The water has already gone from a meal before it goes in the mix. That twenty per cent therefore stands for a good deal more animal than the same figure of fresh beef would. Below it the label loosens: the meat pieces are declared without an animal, and the oil at the tail is given only as poultry, with no chicken, turkey or duck named. Those are the corners where a batch can shift without the wording changing.

The analysis is genuinely lean. Protein converts to 22.3% of dry matter and fat to only 5.4%, which is a very light pairing by any standard, and energy sits at 328 kcal per 100g. A bowl built this way feeds in generous portions and suits a dog whose weight needs holding steady more than it suits one burning through a working day.

The added panel is dosed in print, with vitamins A, D3 and E declared alongside copper at 11.5 mg and vitamin E at 50 mg. Antioxidants and preservatives are listed as categories with no names given. That is common on a food like this. It is the last small gap in an otherwise readable panel.

£2.60 a kilo, sold in 3kg and 15kg bags with a 300g sample bag available first.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets through roughly 256 grams a day, which works out at about £0.67 a day. That takes an energy need of around 840 kcal (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide is a little more generous, feeding 295 to 435 grams a day to a dog between 12 and 25kg.