Fidelis Fresh Menu (grain free recipes): Duck with Sweet Potato, Pear and Blueberries review

Every recipe here lands in our Outstanding band, and so does the typical fresh food. Read that as a sign of how strong the fresh category is, because there is nothing ordinary about this range. The Salmon and the Beef share the lead on our scoring, but the spread is slim enough that your dog's protein history should be doing the choosing. Protein and processing and transparency read Outstanding on all six labels. Nutritional balance is Outstanding on five and Excellent on the Chicken, about as clean a sweep as our scoring hands out.

Ingredients, as declared: Fresh Duck Meat (60%), Fresh Duck Necks (10%), Fresh Sweet Potato (6%), Fresh Carrot (4%), Fresh Peas (2%), Fresh Kale (2%), Fresh Pear (2%), Fresh Blueberries (2%), Fresh Courgette (Zucchini) (2%), Pumpkin Seeds (2%), Brewer's Yeast (2%), Algae Oil (2%), Fresh Cranberries (1.6%), Wheat Germ Oil (1%), Algae Powder (0.6%), Rosehip Shells (0.4%), Rosemary (0.3%), Seaweed Powder (0.1%).

Gentle cooking is the whole proposition. Meat goes in raw and is cooked through, never extruded. Nothing is dried out afterwards either, so the 60% muscle meat on most of these labels is 60% of a wet food. Offal gets a line of its own at 10%, which is unusual and welcome. Organ meat carries vitamins and minerals that muscle alone runs short of, and the label prints the amount.

Fresh produce does the plant work here, with no processed starch on the list. Sweet potato, carrot, courgette, peas, kale, spinach and broccoli do the vegetable work, and the fruit is apple, pear, blueberries and cranberries, nearly all of it pinned between 1% and 6%. Estimated carbohydrate ranges from 12.0% of dry matter on the Salmon up to 29.4% on the Chicken, a light load in any company.

The fat here comes from oils, with no rendered animal fat anywhere on the six labels. Algae oil appears on four of the six at between 1.5% and 2%, and it is an omega 3 source that is grown. The Pork uses hemp seed oil and the Salmon its own salmon oil at 1.5%. Wheat germ oil turns up on five labels at 1% to 1.5%, bringing vitamin E and unsaturated fat along with the wheat name. For a wheat-sensitive dog it is the single thing separating the Beef recipe from the rest.

The small print does real work. Brewer's yeast at around 2% brings B vitamins and a complete set of amino acids. Algae powder and seaweed powder supply minerals and iodine in fractions of a percent, and pumpkin and sunflower seeds sit at 1% to 2% for their oils. Nearly every list closes with rosehip shells and rosemary. The rosemary is doing two jobs at once, since it is also a natural antioxidant and slows the fats turning.

The added panel is short and printed per 100g: vitamin D with manganese, copper, selenium and zinc. Vitamin D runs at 100 IU on the Duck against 35 IU on most of the others, with a slightly lighter set again on the Salmon. There is no long synthetic vitamin list, which is consistent with a recipe leaning on fresh ingredients for the rest of the job.

Duck meat at 60% with 10% duck necks behind it, so bone comes along with the meat, and it is the richest of the bird recipes with fat converting to 34.2% of dry matter. Cranberries at 1.6%, pear and kale widen the produce list, algae oil rises to 2%, and the vitamin D dose is printed higher on this label than on any other in the range.

The Turkey recipe works out at £10.42 a kilo. Jars are 400g, and the packs hold 6, 12 or 18 of them.

Fresh food is mostly water by weight, so the daily amount looks large. Working from about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets through roughly 467 to 636 grams a day. The spread depends on the recipe. On the Turkey that comes to about £6.21 a day.