GAIN Original review

The band here is Poor, two bands below the Good the typical adult dry food occupies, and almost all of that distance is about disclosure. When a recipe is written in headings there is no meat to credit, no grain to credit and no way to know whether this bag matches the last one. There is nothing poor in the analysis, only nothing remarkable: protein at the modest end, fat about where you would expect on an everyday kibble, carbohydrate a little heavy. Dogs eat this food happily and hold their condition on it, and the band is a comment on the label in front of us, not a forecast about your dog.

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

Six entries cover the whole recipe and five of them are category headings. That is entirely legal and very common on everyday food, but it does mean the recipe can be reformulated inside those headings without a single word changing on the bag.

Cereals might be maize, wheat, barley, rice or oats, in any proportion. Some of those are excellent grains for a dog and some are plain ones, and there is no telling from the pack which is in front of you.

Meat and animal derivatives covers the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals plus the products of processing the carcass. It can be quality material and it can be plain material. What it does confirm is that the animal content comes from land animals rather than from fish.

Minerals are listed but not dosed, and ash at 8.2% of dry matter suggests a reasonable mineral load is in the kibble even so. Products from the processing of plants closes the list, another heading that could stand for a fibre, a starch or a binder.

On a dry matter basis the recipe reads protein 22.8%, fat 10.9%, fibre 3.3% and carbohydrate an estimated 54.8%, against 46.2% typical for an adult dry food. Moisture is not printed, so the usual 8% for a kibble has been assumed to get there. Those are the numbers of a plain, grain-forward everyday food, and they match what the front of the bag sets out to be.

Sold in 3kg and 15kg bags.

Feeding a 15kg adult in moderate condition comes out near 251 grams a day, based on about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The pack's table asks 100 grams for a 4kg dog and 720 grams for a 60kg dog, with everything in between scaled to weight.