Harringtons Superfood Grain Free Puppy review

Our Good band takes this one in, alongside the typical puppy dry food. Transparency reads Outstanding, protein and processing Average, and nutritional balance and value Good. The ingredients themselves read better than that suggests: one named meat, a grain free base and a tail of extras dosed in print.

The analysis around them is what holds the reading down. The starch share sits above the middle of the field, crude ash is at the low end, and the bag declares no calcium at all despite being sold from toy to giant.

Ingredients, as declared: 35% Chicken (Including, 26% Dried Chicken*, 5% Chicken Fat, min 4% Freshly Prepared Chicken), Sweet Potato (26%), Potato, Peas, Beans (8%), Linseed (4%), Beet Pulp (4%), Salmon Oil (2%), Minerals, Superfood Botanical Blend: Rosemary, Spinach, Pomegranate & Blueberries (1500mg/kg), FOS (1000mg/kg), Yeasts (1000mg/kg), Seaweed (1000mg/kg)

The chicken is broken into three named parts, which is the right way to do it. Dried chicken at 26% is the biggest of them and the most useful, since a dried meat has no water left to lose in the oven. Chicken fat at 5% and a minimum of 4% freshly prepared chicken make up the remainder of the 35% headline.

Nothing else on the list is an animal meat, so a pup being kept to one meat is genuinely well served here. The qualification is salmon oil at 2%, which puts fish into the recipe, so this suits a preference for chicken better than it suits a strict fish free exclusion.

Grain is absent altogether. Sweet potato carries the starch at 26%, with potato, peas and beans at 8% behind it. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 41.9% of dry matter against the 39.0% typical of a puppy dry food. That is worked from the assumed moisture of 8% a dry food gets when the label leaves the figure off.

Protein is printed at 30.0% and converts to 32.6% of dry matter, with fat at 14.0% and crude fibre at 3.5%. Crude ash is unusually low at 6.0%, converting to 6.5% of dry matter, which is a lighter mineral load than most growth kibbles carry.

Calcium is not declared. In a growth food it is the figure that carries the most weight. It matters most to anyone rearing a pup towards a large or giant frame, where how much calcium goes into the bowl does real work on the way the skeleton develops. A claim to suit those sizes wants a printed number standing behind it.

Linseed at 4% and beet pulp at 4% sit together in the middle of the list. Linseed carries omega 3 in its plant form with gentle fibre alongside, and beet pulp is a well tolerated fibre of its own. Salmon oil at 2% adds the marine omegas that linseed on its own cannot supply.

The tail is short and every part of it is dosed: a botanical blend of rosemary, spinach, pomegranate and blueberries at 1500mg/kg, then FOS, yeasts and seaweed at 1000mg/kg each. FOS is a prebiotic and the yeasts sit alongside it doing related work in the gut.

Vitamin A heads the added panel with a dose beside it. Vitamin D3 is at 1600 iu, vitamin E at 150mg and taurine at 1000mg per kilo. Zinc follows at 75mg, with iron and manganese at 50mg each, copper at 5mg and iodine at 1mg. Selenium at 0.2mg is the organic form rather than sodium selenite, a small choice on the panel and a better absorbed one.

£4.20 a kilo, sold in 1.7kg and 10kg bags.

The bag's guide gives 150g a day for a pup of 5 to 10kg, 250g from 10 to 20kg and 420g from 20 to 40kg. What a growing dog needs early on is not what they need later, so let the growth chart set the amount and adjust it to how your pup is carrying themselves.