Feedwell Maintenance review

Our scoring places this in our Poor band, below the Good band where the typical adult dry food sits. The gap is not about anything alarming in the bowl; it is about how little the label commits to. Whole cereal and meat meal could each be several different things, and protein and processing reads Poor for exactly that reason, while transparency reads Average. Judged as the plain maintenance feed it sets out to be, it does that job; the score measures what the label lets us verify, and here that is not much.

Ingredients, as declared: Whole Cereal, Meat Meal, Soya Oil, Vitamins and Minerals.

The entire recipe fits in four entries: whole cereal, meat meal, soya oil, and vitamins and minerals. Labels were commonly written this way a generation ago, and the style survives in plain working and kennel feeds like this one. What it gains in simplicity it gives up in detail, because not one of those entries names its source.

Whole cereal leads the list, so this is a cereal-first bowl, and the grain behind the word could be wheat, or maize, or barley, or a blend that changes between batches. Meat meal follows, and it deserves a fair hearing. Its water is already gone. That is how a modest inclusion still supports 18% declared protein. The catch is the same as the cereal's. No species is named, so a dog with a known food trigger has nothing to go on here.

Fat comes from soya oil, declared at 6%. That is lean for a dry recipe. Energy works out at an estimated 314 kcal per 100g, so portions run a little larger than they would on a richer kibble, and a greedy dog gets more volume for the same calories.

The vitamin and mineral package is the most talkative part of the label. Every addition is dosed in print. Vitamin D is given at 1,500 IU/kg and vitamin E at 80 mg/kg, with figures printed for vitamin A, for iron and copper, for manganese and zinc, and for selenium. Moisture and ash go undeclared. That is why the analysis stops at protein, fat and fibre. No dry-matter conversion appears on this page either.

£1.17 a kilo from the 15kg bag. It also comes in 2.5kg and 10kg bags, with a 5 x 2.5kg multipack alongside.

As a guide, feeding works out at around £0.31 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, roughly 268 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for a 12 to 25kg dog is 250 to 350 grams a day.