Dr Veneta Freeze-Dried Stay Mobile review

The freeze dried shelf as a whole scores in our Outstanding band, which makes it one of the tougher crowds a food can walk into. Stay Mobile walks in comfortably, landing just below the middle of that field and well inside the band. Protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value each come back Outstanding, so the ingredient list, the analysis and the way this label declares itself are all doing a share of the work.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (75.2%), Swede (10%), Carrot (6%), Chicken Heart (5%), Blueberry (1%), Beet pulp, Seaweed, Fermented Saccharomyces cerevisiae(as a source of prebiotic MOS and beta glucans), Marine Collagen, Chicory root (as a source of prebiotic), Glucosamine, Chondroitin sulphate, Yucca, Dandelion root, Green tea, Hawthorn leaf, Boswellia, Ginger, Turmeric, Black Pepper.

Freeze drying pulls the water out at low temperature and never cooks it out. That is how a food leaves the factory at 1.7% moisture and still tastes to a dog like the raw ingredient it began as. With so little water left, the as fed and dry matter columns sit almost on top of each other, protein reading 58.1% and 59.1% respectively.

Chicken at 75.2% leads, and chicken heart at 5% is the sort of entry you rarely see spelled out on a label. Heart is muscle that never stops working, and it carries the nutrients that come with tissue of that kind. Most people think of it as an organ. Naming it on the label is a small sign of a maker with little to hide. Marine collagen appears further down, so while the poultry is kept to one bird, there is an animal ingredient from the sea in the recipe as well.

Swede at 10% and carrot at 6% do the vegetable work, with blueberry at 1% for colour and antioxidant value. Cooked carrot gives a dog vitamin A along with soluble fibre and is easy on the digestion. Nothing starchy sits behind them, no grain, potato or pulse, which is why the carbohydrate estimate stays down at 6.4% of dry matter.

The joint theme runs right through the second half of the composition. Glucosamine and chondroitin appear together, which is the pairing most often chosen for cartilage support, and boswellia, ginger and turmeric follow as the plant side of the same thought. Black pepper closes the label, the traditional companion to turmeric in kitchens the world over.

Gut work sits alongside the joints. The prebiotic MOS and beta glucans come from fermented Saccharomyces cerevisiae, chicory root supplies the prebiotic FOS, and beet pulp hands the large intestine some fermentable fibre to work on. Seaweed brings iodine and a broad set of trace minerals, while yucca is the usual choice where a maker has stool odour on their mind.

There is no additives panel on this food at all, and no synthetic vitamin or mineral premix appears anywhere on the page. Most complete foods print one, so the absence deserves naming plainly rather than glossing over. What this recipe does instead is put its nutrition into whole ingredients, and the maker is the right person to ask how the numbers are covered if your dog is going to eat nothing else.

£29.90 a kilo. It is sold as 125g and 500g packs, and it appears again in the 625g Discover Set and in the 2.5kg Wellness Set.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at roughly 181 grams a day here, or about £5.41 a day. That assumes 840 kcal a day, from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75.