Engage Mother & Puppy review

Engage Mother & Puppy comes out in our Good band, alongside the middle of the puppy kibble field. Value, protein and processing and nutritional balance all read Good, and transparency reads Average, so the recipe is simply built along older lines than the market's current front runners.

What holds it back is mostly a matter of naming. One of the two meats is described only as poultry, and the added fat is described the same way, so a fair part of the animal content cannot be traced to a species. The label also stops short of a calcium declaration and an energy figure. What it does well is name every grain it uses and put a dried meat first, and those are not small things.

Ingredients, as declared: Dehydrated Salmon Meat, Rice, Dehydrated Poultry Meat, Pearled Barley, Poultry Fat, Sorghum, Dehulled Oats, Full Fat Linseed, Beet Pulp, Chicken Gravy, Sodium Chloride, Yeast Extract, Chicory Extract, Contains Chondroitin and Glucosamine. Meat content: 39% (stated only in the product listing/short description, not in the Composition block)

Dehydrated salmon meat opens the list, and the dehydrated part is the useful bit. The water has already gone, so its share stays intact in the finished kibble and does not shrink away in the oven. The total meat content is given as 39%, though that figure lives in the product description rather than in the composition block. The ingredients list on its own does not tell you how much is in there.

Dehydrated poultry meat comes third and is the recipe's main ambiguity. Poultry covers any domestic fowl, so chicken, duck, goose or turkey could all be in the mix, and it can change between batches. Poultry fat further down carries the same looseness. There is nothing wrong with poultry as a nutrient source and it is highly palatable. A dog with a suspected intolerance to one particular bird cannot be safely fed from a list written this way. Chicken gravy is at least named, and chicken is the bird flagged on the allergen picture.

Four grains carry the starch. Rice is easily digested and one of the better cereals for a young dog, pearled barley brings fibre and a range of micronutrients, and dehulled oats add more fibre still. Sorghum is a gluten free grass grain that does a plain starch job without matching rice or oats for quality. Carbohydrate converts to 39.0% of dry matter, matching the puppy kibble average, so the grain route has not made this a heavier bowl than most.

The useful extras are few but well chosen. Full fat linseed supplies plant omega 3 and a good deal of fibre, and beet pulp adds a gentle, well tolerated fibre of its own. Chicory extract is a source of inulin, a prebiotic for the friendly bacteria down in the large intestine. Yeast extract and sodium chloride round the list off, and the label notes that chondroitin and glucosamine are in there without saying how much.

The declared analysis is respectable for a recipe of this build: protein at 29.0% as fed converting to 31.9% of dry matter, fat at 17.0% converting to 18.7%, and ash at 7.5%. Energy is not declared, so the 370 kcal per 100g in the table is our estimate. The added panel prints vitamin E at 250 IU, zinc at 140 mg, iron at 134 mg, manganese at 65 mg, copper at 28 mg, iodine at 2.45 mg and selenium at 0.33 mg. Vitamin A and D3 are given in international units as well. The trace elements come mainly as oxides and sulphates, not the chelated forms some makers now use. No calcium figure appears, which on a food written for growth and lactation is the line most worth having.

£2.53 a kilo, in 3kg and 15kg bags.

A puppy's daily amount climbs steeply and then settles again. Start from the label's guide and let your dog's condition do the fine tuning.