Feedwell Mini review

The Average band is where our scoring puts this one, a rung below the typical adult dry food. It gets there on a short list where the meat is unnamed and maize takes first place. The label also leaves out enough of the analysis that part of the picture has to be estimated. What it does not do is fall short. Protein at 23.5% is respectable for a food of this kind, the vitamin and mineral dosing is complete and printed, and a small dog with an unremarkable constitution can eat this quite happily.

Ingredients, as declared: Whole maize, meat meal, soya oil, vitamins and minerals

Whole maize leads, and whole is the operative word, since the whole grain keeps its bran and germ, with nothing stripped back to plain starch. Cooked, most dogs handle maize perfectly well, and here it is doing the bulk of the energy work.

Meat meal is the animal share, and the word meat is the limitation. Meal itself is a good thing to see. It is a dried protein, and it comes in at roughly the weight it will hold in the finished kibble. With no species in front of it, though, the animal could be beef, or chicken, or lamb, or a mixture that differs between batches. Protein still lands at 23.5% as fed, so the meal is clearly present in quantity.

Soya oil supplies the added fat at a level that keeps the total to 9%. Soya has a mixed reputation in dog food, most of it earned by soya protein and soya meal. Both get used as stand ins for meat, and both are far harder for a dog to make use of. The oil is a different thing altogether, a refined fat carrying almost no protein with it, so the usual soya objection lands much more softly here.

The premix is printed in full. Vitamin E is at 80mg, iron as ferrous sulphate at 333mg and manganese as manganous oxide at 80.64mg. Copper comes as cupric sulphate at 16mg and zinc as zinc oxide at 14mg per kilo, with sodium selenite at 2.2mg. Oxides and sulphates are the older forms of these minerals, and a dog's gut takes them up a little less efficiently than chelates. Zinc in particular sits at a modest level for a dry food.

Fibre is declared at 3.5%, and energy works out at an estimated 328 kcal per 100g, calculated from the analysis because the bag does not print it. That is a genuinely modest energy density. A small dog gets a reasonable bowl to look at.

£2.10 a kilo, sold in a 2.5kg bag, an 8kg bag and a case of five 2.5kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 256 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), which comes to £0.54 a day. The label's own chart asks 250 to 350 grams for a dog between 12kg and 25kg, so let the waistline settle it.