CSJ That'll Do / Hi Lost review

Our scoring puts this in the Good band, level with the typical adult dry food, and it is worth being precise about how it gets there. Chicken meal is a good second ingredient and the vitamins and minerals are all dosed on the label. What the band reflects is proportion: protein finishes at 23.3% of dry matter and carbohydrate at 55.2%, with wheat leading the list. The plant side is doing the bulk of the carrying, and nutritional balance reads Average as a result. For a dog that has eaten this way happily for years with no sign of a cereal problem, it remains a perfectly serviceable everyday bowl.

Ingredients, as declared: Wheat, Chicken meal, Maize, Chicken fat, Chicken gravy, Rice, Beet pulp, Alfalfa, Salmon oil, Minerals, Oats, Yeast, Yucca schidigera.

Wheat opens the list, and that single line tells you most of what you need to know about how the recipe is built. Wheat makes a firm, consistent kibble, and most dogs eat it without any bother at all. Where a dog does turn out to have a grain intolerance, wheat is usually the cereal involved. The signs usually show in the skin or the digestion.

Chicken meal comes second, in the dried and concentrated form, so it brings more protein to the mix than its position alone might suggest. No percentage is given for it. That is this label's main gap: the running order is there, the amounts are not.

Maize, rice and oats fill out the cereal side. Of the three, rice is the gentlest on a sensitive digestion, and oats bring fibre with a spread of trace minerals attached. The carbohydrate here is at least varied.

Chicken fat and chicken gravy handle energy and palatability. Skin and coat lean on marine omega 3s, and salmon oil is where they come from. Alfalfa adds a little plant protein and bulk, and beet pulp does the fibre work.

The additive panel covers the ground, with zinc at 62.5 mg/kg, iron at 50 mg/kg and vitamin E at 230 mg/kg all printed. Everything arrives in the simple sulphate forms rather than as chelates, which is the ordinary choice at this level, and selenium is sodium selenite at 0.2 mg/kg. Right at the end comes yucca schidigera, in there to soften what your dog leaves behind in the garden.

Sold as a 15 kg sack at £1.31 a kilo.

Working from the standard maintenance estimate of 840 kcal for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75), that dog would eat about 220 grams a day, putting the day rate around £0.29. The label's less active guide runs 148 to 250 grams for dogs of 10kg to 20kg. If the two disagree, let the waistline settle it.