Hero by Asda Adult Dog Dry: With Chicken, Rice & Veg review

Our Average band holds both recipes, a step below the Good band where the typical adult dry food is found, and what the label declines to say accounts for nearly all of that gap. Category names do the work that species names would do elsewhere: cereals, meat and animal derivatives, vegetables, oils and fats, derivatives of vegetable origin. Protein and processing reads Poor as a result, and nutritional balance with it, since neither the animals nor the cereals can be checked. None of that means a dog will fail to thrive on it, and many do perfectly well; it means a label reader cannot verify the things we check. The one thing this pack does not supply is the name of the animal in the bowl.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals (4% Rice in the Rice Component), Meat and Animal Derivatives 24% (4% Chicken in the Chicken Component), Vegetables (4% Peas in the Pea Component), Oils and Fats, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Minerals, Dried Chicory Root (0.1%), Total Meat and Animal Derivatives 24%, Chicken component typically 20%, Rice component typically 20%, Pea component typically 80% of product

Meat and animal derivatives names a legal category, and it says nothing about quality. It covers the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals, plus whatever comes out of processing the carcass. That takes in genuinely good material and much plainer material alike. The term itself does not tell you which of those is in the bag, and neither does anything else on the pack. The same goes for cereals, oils and fats, and derivatives of vegetable origin: all are umbrella terms, and all of them allow the exact contents to change from batch to batch.

Within that block, each recipe names a small declared slice. The beef bag names 4% beef inside its beef component and the chicken bag names 4% chicken inside its chicken component, with the chicken recipe also naming 4% rice. So the named species is a real, printed presence, just a modest one against the 24% total.

The composition text is also worth reading twice. It states that the pea component is typically 80% of the product while the beef component is typically 20%. That cannot be squared with a 24% meat block and 4% peas sitting on the same label. Read the itemised list rather than that summary line, because the itemised list is the part that has to be in descending order by weight.

Dried chicory root at 0.1% is the one entry chosen for a specific job. Chicory is rich in inulin, a fibre the useful gut bacteria feed on, and it is the reason a kibble like this can claim a digestive angle at all. The dose is small, as prebiotic doses usually are, and there is no harm at all in having it there.

The additives are dosed and printed, more than the ingredient list manages. Copper sits at 8 mg, manganese at 30 mg, iron at 40 mg, zinc at 40 mg, iodine at 2 mg and selenium at 0.1 mg per kilo, with vitamin E at 90 mg. The forms are the basic ones throughout, zinc as the oxide and selenium as sodium selenite, not the better absorbed chelated and yeast versions. That is the ordinary specification on an everyday kibble. The nutrition is there; the refinement is not.

The one recipe in the pair that names part of its cereal, with 4% rice declared inside the cereal component alongside 4% chicken inside the 24% meat block. It runs a little richer at 352 kcal per 100g with fat at 9.5%, and its ash is lower at 9.8% of dry matter. Few cereals sit as gently on a dog's digestion as rice, so naming even part of it is useful to a reader.

£1.18 a kilo for the beef recipe, sold in a 5kg bag, and £0.83 a kilo for the chicken, which comes in 5kg and 12kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is about 255 grams of the beef bag or 239 grams of the chicken. It comes to about £0.30 a day on the beef bag and £0.20 on the chicken. The pack asks 200 to 360 grams for a dog between 10kg and 20kg, so weigh the bowl for the first week and settle it against your dog's waistline.