Freshpet Select Rolls: Tasty Pork with Peas & Carrots review

Every roll here lands in our Outstanding band, and so does the typical fresh food, which puts this range squarely among the strongest company we score. The Tender Chicken and the Beef Recipe edge ahead of the others on our scoring, with the Complete Nutrition Turkey and the small dog turkey and pork roll a shade behind. Eight rolls all landing in one band is not a spread worth choosing by. Protein and processing and transparency read Outstanding on all eight labels, and value carries the same word right across the range.

Ingredients, as declared: Pork (33%), Turkey (33%), Potato Starch, Peas (4%), Carrots (4%), Minerals, Pea Protein, Rice Flour, Psyllium Fibre, Celery powder, Vinegar

A roll is a different way of buying fresh food. It sits in the fridge, it slices, and the thickness of the slice is the portion, which suits an owner who would rather see dinner than weigh it. Nothing needs thawing, and gently cooked food keeps far more of its aroma than anything that has been through an extruder at pressure.

The meat share is high on every label and named to species. Complete Nutrition Turkey runs 75% turkey; All Life Stages Turkey 65% with 4% egg alongside; the Beef Recipe splits into 30% beef, 28% chicken and 12% beef liver. The paired rolls sit in the high sixties between two animals apiece. Only the Complete Nutrition Turkey keeps to one animal from top to bottom, which makes it the roll for a strict single-protein plan.

Behind the meat, the recipes barely change. Potato starch binds the roll, rice flour follows it, psyllium fibre adds a soluble fibre that helps the gut hold things together, and celery powder with vinegar close nearly every list as natural preservatives. Pea protein, a plant concentrate, is on most of the rolls. It lifts the analysis without adding animal, so a little of their protein figure comes from the plant side of the recipe.

The vegetables are small, fresh and honestly labelled. Carrots, peas, pumpkin, potatoes and spinach appear at 1% to 6%. The Beef Recipe adds rice bran and 1.5% brown rice, and the All Life Stages Turkey adds seaweed powder for its trace minerals and iodine. Only the Beef Recipe uses garlic powder, and the measured amount there is small enough to sit comfortably away from any worry.

The mineral panels come in two styles. Most rolls carry sulphate and iodide forms of zinc, copper, manganese and iodine with vitamin E at 60 IU. The Beef Recipe uses amino acid chelates instead and prints a longer panel adding iron and selenium. Chelates are usually picked because they absorb well. Either way the doses are on the label rather than gestured at.

The analysis is thinner than the ingredient lists. Ash is printed on the Beef Recipe and the Tender Chicken only, so those are the two we can put onto a dry matter basis, where protein reads 40.0% and 42.6% respectively. On the rest, read the as-fed figures as they stand: protein between 10.5% and 13.0%, fat between 6.0% and 12.0%, and moisture between 66.0% and 74.0%, all of which is normal for food this wet.

Despite the name on the front, pork at 33% and turkey at 33% share the bowl exactly, with 4% peas and 4% carrots behind them. Protein is declared at 12.6%, the highest as-fed figure among the rolls that pair two birds or a bird with a pig, and at 700g it is a mid-sized roll for a mid-sized dog.

Six of the eight rolls work out at £6.62 a kilo. Rolls come at 400g, 680g, 700g and 2kg, with the Tender Chicken Recipe the only one sold in three different sizes.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works through between 464 and 678 grams a day depending on the roll. That is worked from about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). On the six rolls with a per kilo figure that lands between £3.07 and £4.49 a day, the wetter small-dog rolls sitting at the top of that range because more of each slice is water.