GreenAcres Grain Free: Turkey & Sweet Potato review

This recipe lands in Good, the band the typical adult dry food occupies, and a fairly plain set of strengths puts it there. Turkey meal at 30% is a concentrated meat share rather than a fresh one carrying water it will lose in the oven. Estimated carbohydrate holds at 41.4% of dry matter where the typical adult dry food runs at 46.2%. That is a genuinely good result for a grain-free build, since sweet potato and peas can easily push a recipe the other way. The functional extras are printed with doses too, which is why transparency reads Excellent. Value and protein and processing both read Good, with nutritional balance at Average. The ceiling is set by the unnamed vegetable oil and by a panel that leaves out moisture and calcium.

Ingredients, as declared: Turkey Meal (30%), Sweet Potato (29%), Dried Peas, Vegetable Oil, Beet Pulp, Linseed, Turkey Digest (3%), Alfalfa, Salmon Oil (1%), Minerals, Seaweed Meal, Chicory Root (1000mg/kg), MOS (1000mg/kg), Glucosamine (300mg/kg), Yucca Extract (200mg/kg)

Turkey meal at 30% is the backbone. Because meal has already been rendered and dried, nearly all of that 30% ends up in the finished kibble. That is how protein reaches 28.3% of dry matter on a food that never mentions fresh meat. Turkey digest at 3% is a palatant, sprayed on so the kibble tastes of something. The bird in it is named, where a generic animal digest would do, and that is the kind of small honesty worth noticing.

Sweet potato at 29% does the work rice does elsewhere in the brand's range. It brings a slower-releasing starch than white cereal along with beta carotene and fibre, and with dried peas and beet pulp beside it, crude fibre reaches 5.1% of dry matter. Keeping estimated carbohydrate down to 41.4% of dry matter while going grain free takes some doing.

Look twice at this label for the gut and joint entries. MOS at 1000mg/kg comes from yeast cell walls and works as a prebiotic in the large intestine. Chicory root at 1000mg/kg adds inulin, doing much the same job from a different direction. Glucosamine at 300mg/kg is aimed squarely at cartilage. Yucca extract at 200mg/kg is the long-standing choice for softening what comes out the other end.

The fats are the weak spot in an otherwise tidy list. Vegetable oil is the main added fat and it names no plant, which could mean anything from rapeseed upward, and it sits alongside salmon oil at 1% and linseed as the omega sources. A named oil would tell you considerably more than this entry does.

The mineral panel uses sulphate and oxide forms, with no chelates, and all are dosed in print. Zinc is at 100mg per kilo, iron at 50mg, manganese at 40mg, copper at 12mg, iodine at 1.5mg and selenium at 0.25mg. Selenium arrives as sodium selenite. Two forms are allowed in pet food, and selenite is the commoner one, while selenised yeast is generally the better absorbed of the pair.

£5.75 a kilo, sold in 2kg and 12kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets through about 243 grams a day. That works from roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate) and an estimated energy figure, and it comes to £1.40 a day. The label's own guide puts the same dog on 230 to 280 grams, so the two land in the same place.