Frolic Complete: Mini, Chicken Flavour review

Both recipes sit in our Poor band, and they arrive there together. Our scoring gives credit where a label names its ingredients, where meat outweighs cereal and where the maker shows its workings, and a category-declared recipe built mostly on grain collects little of that credit. The band describes the label more than the dinner: this is an everyday food doing an everyday job, and a dog that is settled and well on it is not doing anything wrong.

Ingredients, as declared: cereals (includes 4% wheat), by-products of vegetable origin, meats and animal by-products (includes 4% fresh poultry meat), oils and fats (includes 1% sunflower oil, includes 0.25% fish oil), vegetables (4% green beans), mineral substances, milk and dairy products, sugars, fish and fish by-products.

Semi-moist sits between kibble and a can. Moisture is declared at 18% in the beef recipe, and at 20% in the Mini. That is what keeps the pieces soft and pliable. The food still stores like a dry one, and it pours and portions like one too. A dog that finds biscuit hard going is exactly who the format is for.

The list is written mostly in legal category terms: grains, meats and animal by-products, by-products of vegetable origin. Categories let a maker vary the exact species and cereals between batches, which is why so few entries carry a name and a figure. The ones that do are wheat at 4%, the headline meat at 4%, a vegetable at 4%, sunflower oil at 1% and fish oil at 0.25%. Nothing here is hidden so much as declared broadly, and it helps to know which kind of label you are reading.

By-products deserve a fairer hearing than the word usually gets. The term stretches from nutrient-dense organ meat to far plainer fractions, and a category label gives no way of telling where in that stretch any given batch sits. The same reading applies on the vegetable side.

The analysis fills in what the list leaves open. On a dry matter basis the beef recipe holds 20.7% protein and the Mini 21.2%, modest figures either way. Carbohydrate is estimated at 49.5% and 48.8% of dry matter, so cereal carries most of the bowl. Fat is livelier: 20.1% of dry matter in the beef recipe, 18.1% in the Mini. Portions deserve an eye on a less active dog.

The added vitamin and mineral panel is dosed in print: vitamins A, D3 and E, with zinc and manganese behind them. Copper and iodine are there too, and so is selenium. That is the standard supplementation a complete food needs, properly declared, and it is also the part of this label where the declaring is at its most exact.

Chicken Flavour names the taste rather than the bird: the label commits to 4% fresh poultry meat without pinning the species down. This recipe also brings milk and dairy products along with sugars and colourants that the beef version does not carry. In a semi-moist food the sugars do double duty: they sweeten the piece and help it stay soft. Green beans stand in for carrots at 4%, moisture is a touch higher at 20%, and it comes in a single 800g bag made with small dogs in mind.

The beef recipe is £9.46 a kilo across its three bag sizes, the largest of them 4kg. The Mini is £10.99 a kilo from its single 800g bag.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at about £2.33 a day on the beef recipe and £2.89 a day on the Mini. The basis there is around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for the beef recipe feeds 190 grams a day at 10kg.