Europa Adult Nutrition Chicken & Rice review

This sits in our Good band, which is also exactly where the typical adult dry food finishes, so it is a middle-of-the-market kibble by our reading and by the market's. The recipe is honest about what it is. Chicken is named and quantified, the cereals are listed one by one with no catch-all to hide behind, and the mineral panel is dosed. Cereal starch takes up a lot of the bowl, and the protein figure lands on the modest side. Those are the two things holding it down. For a dog with no particular requirements, none of that gets in the way of a decent daily dinner.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 29% (including Dried Chicken 26% & Chicken Fat 3%), Rice (26%), Barley, Oats, Beet Pulp (2%), Dried Fish, Brewers Yeast, Minerals, Yucca Extract (190 mg/kg)

The chicken at 29% is all dried chicken at 26% plus 3% chicken fat, and dried is the useful word. Weighing happens after the water has gone, so nearly the whole 26% reaches the finished kibble as protein. That is a more reliable thing to buy than a larger fresh figure that shrinks in the oven. Protein converts to 26.1% of dry matter and fat to 8.7%.

The cereal side is rice at 26%, then barley, then oats. Rice is about as easy a grain as a dog can be given once cooked. Barley carries gluten as well as fibre and a range of micronutrients. Oats add more fibre plus manganese and B vitamins. Together they put estimated carbohydrate at 55.4% of dry matter, against 46.2% for the typical adult dry food, which is the plain arithmetic of a cereal-based recipe.

Dried fish sits mid-list without a species attached to it, doing a palatability job and adding marine protein. Brewer's yeast is a better entry than it looks, one of the richest natural sources of B vitamins and a complete protein in its own right. Firm stools are the job of the beet pulp at 2%, a fermentable fibre.

The one functional extra is yucca extract, and the label gives it a printed dose of 190 mg/kg. It takes the edge off what a dog leaves in the garden, a small thing until you are the one collecting it.

The mineral panel is fully dosed, with zinc and iron at 50 mg/kg, manganese at 35 mg/kg, copper at 15 mg/kg and iodine at 1 mg/kg, plus vitamin E at 95 IU. All of those are sulphates and not chelates, the ordinary choice. Selenium comes as sodium selenite at 0.3 mg/kg, the commoner of the two permitted forms and the one a dog absorbs less readily.

£3.33 a kilo, sold in a 15kg bag.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), which is roughly 241 grams of this kibble and £0.80 a day. The label's own table asks 190 to 325 grams for dogs between 10kg and 20kg, so treat your dog's shape as the referee between the two.