Hero by Asda Light Adult Dry review

Our reading comes out Average, and the naming shapes it on the nutrition side as much as on the disclosure one. Five of the seven entries on the ingredient list are umbrella terms, wide enough to cover different material from one batch to the next. We cannot credit a label for what it will not name. A typical adult dry food reaches our Good band largely by naming more.

Where the recipe does answer for itself is the brief on the front. Fat at 7.5% and 318 kcal per 100g are genuinely restrained, and when a waistline needs taking in, that is the figure to watch.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals (4% Rice in the Rice Component), Meat and Animal Derivatives 22% (4% Chicken in the Chicken Component), Vegetables (4% Peas in the Pea Component), Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Oils and Fats, Minerals, Chicory Root (0.1%), Total Meat and Animal Derivatives 22%, Chicken & Rice Component Typically 40% (of Which 4% Chicken & 4% Rice) Pea Component Typically 60% (of Which 4% Peas)

There are two kibbles in this bag. A chicken and rice component makes up typically 40% of the product and a pea component the other 60%, and inside those, chicken, rice and peas are each declared at 4%. Everything else arrives under a category name.

Meat and animal derivatives at 22% is the protein backbone. In law that term takes in the parts of slaughtered land animals that never reach the butcher's counter. It stretches from genuinely good material down to the very ordinary, and nothing on the pack shows a reader which end the bag came from. Cereals, vegetables and the oils and fats work the same way, naming neither a plant nor a source.

Chicory root at 0.1% is the one functional extra. It supplies inulin, a soluble fibre the good gut bacteria thrive on, and at that level it is a quiet nudge and no more.

The analysis reads as a light diet should. Protein converts to 21.7% of dry matter and fat to 8.2%, both modest. Carbohydrate is estimated at 57.0% of dry matter against 46.2% for the typical adult dry food. That makes for a plant heavy bowl, so a dog with a big appetite may finish quickly and go looking for more.

The added panel is dosed in print: zinc 40 mg, iron 40 mg, manganese 30 mg, copper 8 mg, iodine 2 mg and selenium 0.1 mg per kilo. The vitamins are printed too, A at 12000 IU, D3 at 1200 IU and E at 90 mg per kilo. Oxides and sulphates supply the trace minerals here, not chelates, and those older forms make a dog's gut work a little harder to take them up.

£1.19 a kilo, sold in a 2.5kg bag.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 265 grams a day, working from roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to £0.31 a day. The label's own table asks 200 to 360 grams for dogs from 10kg to 20kg, and the waistline settles the rest.