Hill's Science Plan Hypoallergenic Small & Mini Adult Dog Food with Salmon review

Scores follow construction, and this construction is starch heavy: dried potatoes at 21%, potato starch and dried peas all sit ahead of a 9% salmon meal. Protein finishes at 21.6% of dry matter with estimated carbohydrate at 55.5%, which puts the food in our Average band while the typical adult dry food holds the Good band. Transparency, by contrast, reads Excellent. The unnamed fat and digest entries are loose ends, not errors on the label. What a general score cannot capture is the reason someone reaches for this bag in the first place, and on that narrow brief, fewer named things to react to, it holds up.

Ingredients, as declared: Dried potatoes (21%), potato starch, dried peas, salmon meal (9%), pea protein, animal fat, digest, vegetable oil, minerals, dried beet pulp, flaxseed, dried carrots, dried tomato pomace, dried citrus pulp, spinach powder.

Dried potatoes at 21% open the list, backed by potato starch and dried peas. That trio does the job cereal does in most kibbles, and potato starch in particular is what lets a grain free biscuit keep its shape. For a small dog eating small amounts, the practical result is a dense, starchy little kibble.

One animal only is named here, salmon meal at 9%. Dried fish meal is concentrated, so it delivers more than the same number would as fresh fish, and it brings omega 3 in the form skin uses without needing to convert it first. Pea protein sits just behind and lifts the protein total, so the 21.6% of dry matter on the analysis is a shared effort between plant and fish.

Two entries stop this being a truly closed recipe, the animal fat and the digest. Digest earns its keep by making the kibble taste of something, which matters more in a small dog than most owners expect, but neither entry says which animal it came from. For everyday sensitivity that is rarely a problem, and for a formal exclusion trial it is the thing to check with your vet.

The mineral panel is printed in full, at 90.3 mg of zinc, 51.5 mg of iron, 5.3 mg of manganese, 5.1 mg of copper, 1.3 mg of iodine and 0.1 mg of selenium per kilo. Both zinc and copper feed into coat condition, and on a food chosen for skin reasons it is good to see those figures printed.

The list closes with beet pulp and flaxseed, plus dried carrots, spinach powder, citrus pulp and tomato pomace. The beet pulp and the flaxseed are the two doing real work, one for the gut and one for the coat. The rest are small antioxidant additions that make the label look longer than the recipe really is.

£6.17 a kilo, sold in a 1.5kg bag.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 227 grams a day on the standard maintenance estimate of 840 kcal (110 × bodyweight^0.75), or £1.40 a day. Small and mini dogs eat far less: the label asks 170 grams a day for a 10kg dog and 50 grams for a 2kg one.