Darf Complete Adult Dry Regular review

This recipe finishes in our Good band, from its upper half, and the middle of the cold-pressed field lands in the same place. Transparency reads Excellent and protein and processing Good, earned by a meat block broken into named cuts with percentages against them. Nutritional balance reads Average, which is fair for an analysis built to be unremarkable, and the incomplete plant side of the published list is the other thing holding it back. What is printed here is genuinely well printed.

Ingredients, as declared: 60% meat (12% chicken necks, 12% beef, 9% lamb, 9% goat, 6%

Cold pressing sets the tone before any ingredient does. The mix is compressed at a low temperature, not cooked and puffed the way extruded kibble is. That gives a dense pellet which crumbles once wet, and Darf builds its whole shelf on the method. The food handles like ordinary dry food in every practical respect.

The meat block is written the way a label should be. Chicken necks at 12% bring bone-in poultry, which is where much of the mineral content arrives. Beef at 12% brings the red meat, and lamb and goat at 9% each fill out the rest of the declared 60%. Goat rarely turns up in a mainstream recipe. If your dog has already been through the common meats, that makes it a useful one to have here.

The list stops after those entries, so the plant side is not something you can read here. What the analysis does tell you is that a substantial plant fraction exists: carbohydrate estimates at 52.1% as fed, or 54.3% of dry matter, against a 43.2% typical for cold-pressed food. That is a normal shape for a pressed pellet, which needs starch to hold itself together. The specifics are a question for Darf, as the label does not answer them.

Elsewhere the analysis behaves itself. Protein converts to 25.0% of dry matter and fat to 10.4%, a moderate pairing that will suit an ordinary walking routine. Energy sits at 387 kcal per 100g, close to the middle of the cold-pressed range where the typical food carries 351. Ash at 7.5% of dry matter is a little on the high side, which is what the chicken necks and the bone they carry would predict.

Calcium converts to 1.38% of dry matter, a healthy adult figure and one that comes from ingredients rather than from a mineral top-up. For the micronutrients the label prints one line, a vitamin and mineral supplement at 0.5% of the recipe. No individual doses come with it.

£4.08 a kilo, in 4kg and 19kg bags.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), that is roughly 217 grams a day, or £0.89.