Gain Maintenance review

This one lands in our Poor band, below the Good band where the typical adult dry food settles. The distance is all about the ingredient list, not about anything measured in a lab. Five headings and a plant processing line give a reader nothing to grade: the meat might be good or plain, the cereal might be any grain, and neither is pinned down anywhere on the pack. Protein sits at the gentle end, and carbohydrate runs higher than a dry food usually carries. The band follows from those two. Real credit belongs to the printed vitamin and mineral panel, and a dog holding good condition on this food is not being let down by it.

It is worth saying that protein and processing and nutritional balance both read Poor for the same single reason, with transparency a step up at Average. When a recipe cannot be read, it cannot be scored generously, however well it happens to be made.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and animal derivatives, Derivatives of vegetable origin, Oils and fats, Minerals, Products from the processing of plants.

Cereals is the broadest heading the labelling rules permit on the grain side. Wheat, maize, barley, rice and oats all live inside it, and the maker keeps the freedom to move between them as the market moves. That does not make the grain poor. It only means you cannot know which grain you have bought.

Meat and animal derivatives is defined in law as the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals together with the products of processing the carcass. That takes in good muscle meat at one end and much plainer material at the other, and the heading will not tell you where on that scale this bag sits. It does confirm the animal content is land based, since fish falls outside the definition.

Derivatives of vegetable origin and oils and fats apply the same idea to the plant side and to the fat. The fat in particular could be an animal fat or a vegetable oil, and nothing on the pack settles it.

The declared analysis is modest and internally consistent: protein 19.5%, fat 8.5%, fibre 3.0% and ash 8.0%, with moisture declared at 8.0% and not left to assumption. On a dry matter basis that gives protein 21.2%, fat 9.2% and carbohydrate an estimated 57.6%, where an adult dry food typically runs 46.2%. Read together, the plant side is carrying most of this bowl.

The added panel is where the label earns something back. Vitamin E at 75 mg, iron at 200 mg, zinc at 278 mg and copper at 60 mg are each printed with the compound they come from. So are manganese at 31 mg, iodine at 2.4 mg and selenium at 3.3 mg per kilo. That is more disclosure than plenty of better-known bags manage. Zinc and copper in particular are the ones skin and coat lean on, so seeing them dosed is worth something.

Sold in a single 15kg bag.

For a 15kg adult in moderate condition the estimate comes to roughly 258 grams a day, taken from about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). On the label's own table a 13kg dog is put at 230 grams and a 40kg dog at 530 grams, and the waistline is the better judge of the two.