Green Pantry Skin & Coat review

Our scoring puts this in the Excellent band, one band above where the typical adult dry food sits in Good. Nothing flashy earns the gap. A large declared meat share, a modest carbohydrate load and a fully dosed mineral panel simply add up.

Ingredients, as declared: 72% Chicken (Freshly Prepared Chicken (42%), Dried Chicken (28%), Chicken Stock (2%), Sweet Potato (9%), Potato (9%), Peas (6%), Fruits, Botanicals & Herbs: Linseed, Alfalfa, Apple, Pumpkin, Cranberry, Tomato, Carrot, Nettle, Seaweed, Celery Seed, Aniseed, Horehound, Brand bullet points: 72% chicken, 26% fruit, vegetables, and botanicals. A well-balanced diet that includes meat, potatoes, fruits, and vegetables to provide natural nutrition. Natural control of intestinal and external hygiene, Made from 100% natural ingredients. Naturally preserved.

That 72% chicken headline comes apart into three printed figures: 42% is freshly prepared chicken, 28% is dried chicken and 2% is chicken stock. Printing that split matters. In the oven fresh meat loses the greater part of its weight to water, so the dried share ends up carrying much of the finished kibble's protein. At 28% it is set up to do that job properly. The analysis agrees: protein converts to 38.0% of dry matter, and the estimated carbohydrate to 31.0%, where the typical adult dry food runs at 46.2%.

The binding is sweet potato and potato at 9% each, and peas at 6% follow them. No grain appears anywhere on the list.

The skin and coat case rests on linseed, the first of the botanicals and the recipe's omega source, with seaweed and nettle in support. There is no fish oil at all, which keeps the whole recipe fish free. There is a trade in that. The omega 3 from linseed is the plant form, and a dog's body is slower to turn it into the skin-active forms than to take them from fish. Give a coat weeks to answer, not days.

The rest of the botanical tail, from apple and pumpkin down to horehound, is seasoning. The recipe stands up without any of it. The chicken and the linseed are doing the real work here.

Every added trace mineral comes chelated and every one is dosed in print. Chelated forms are absorbed more readily. Zinc sits at 48 mg, iron at 48 mg, manganese at 34 mg, copper at 6 mg and iodine at 0.96 mg per kilo. Skin leans on zinc harder than on any other trace mineral, so a dosed and chelated zinc entry is exactly what you want on a food with this name.

£6.90 a kilo, in bags of 1.5kg, 5kg and 10kg.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 229 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £1.58 a day. The label's own guide asks 250 to 375 grams for dogs between 10kg and 19kg. If the two disagree, the waistline is the judge.