COYA Freeze-Dried Puppy review

This lands in our Outstanding band, and it earns it on a very short list indeed: one animal, four plants, a fruit pair and the premix, every one of them carrying a percentage. Protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value all read Outstanding, so nothing is being propped up by anything else.

Freeze-dried puppy food is a small enough corner that there is no cohort to place this against, so the band is the recipe's own measure and not a position in a field. Read it as a label that leaves very little to guess at.

Ingredients, as declared: 80% Chicken, 6% Sweet Potato, 4.5% Carrot, 3% Pea, 2% Apple, 2% Pear, Vitamins and Minerals

The making is what protects the meat here. Food is frozen first and then has its water drawn off under vacuum, so nothing is cooked at extrusion temperature and the structure of the chicken survives largely intact. Declared moisture is 5.0%. That is what keeps the pieces good in the cupboard, and it is why the 80% chicken printed on the pack is 80% of what you actually pour out.

There is a reason chicken is the meat used most in dog food. Puppies find it very palatable and it digests easily. The protein in it is protein a puppy can use. More dogs react to chicken than to any other single meat. That is the flip side of all that popularity. Keep it somewhere in your mind as the puppy grows, without borrowing trouble that has not arrived.

The plants are few and all named. Sweet potato at 6% carries most of the recipe's starch, carrot at 4.5% brings vitamin A, soluble fibre and natural antioxidants, and pea at 3% adds fibre and a little plant protein. Apple and pear at 2% each are seasoning rather than substance. Carbohydrate is estimated at 8.0%, converting to 8.4% of dry matter, which is about as low as a complete puppy food goes.

The analysis is built for growth. Protein converts to 49.5% of dry matter and fat to 33.7%, and 519 kcal per 100g is a lot of building material in a small serving. That density is normal for the format and it is the point of it. It does mean the difference between a level scoop and a heaped one shows up on a puppy far faster than it would on an adult.

The added panel is properly dosed. Vitamin A is at 2500 IU, vitamin D3 at 250 IU. Vitamin E is at 50 mg, iron at 10 mg, zinc at 15 mg, copper at 1.5 mg and organic selenium at 0.02 mg. Calcium pantothenate at 1.5 mg sits alongside them, and despite the name that is a B vitamin rather than a calcium source, so no calcium figure is declared here. On a puppy food it is the one number worth a message to the maker, and all the more so for a puppy that will grow large.

£46.65 a kilo. The packs are 150g and 750g, with multipacks of 6 x 150g and 3 x 750g for a household getting through it quickly.

A puppy's portion moves as the puppy does, so no single daily figure holds for long. Weigh the puppy, feed to the guide for the weight it is now, and step the amount up as the growth chart moves.