Hill's Science Plan Puppy <1 Small & Mini review

Our reading puts this bag in our Good band, level with the typical puppy kibble, with protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency all coming back Good and none of them going beyond it. That spread tells you the shortfall is even rather than concentrated in one place. Transparency is the interesting part of it. The analysis and the calcium are printed clearly and the poultry is given a percentage. The fat and the digest go unnamed, though, and wheat appears high enough on the list to count, and those are the entries doing the damage.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken and turkey meal (chicken 19%; total poultry 29%), broken rice, wheat, animal fat, maize, digest, dried beet pulp, maize protein meal, minerals, flaxseed, fish oil (1.5%), vegetable oil, oat bran, fructo-oligosaccharides, dried tomato pomace, dried citrus pulp, spinach powder.

The list opens on chicken and turkey meal, given as 19% chicken within 29% total poultry. Meal is dried meat, with its water taken out well before the mixer, so the printed percentage maps reasonably closely to what ends up in the kibble. Protein lands at 27.7%, or 30.1% once converted onto a dry matter basis.

Broken rice and wheat carry the biscuit between them, with maize and maize protein meal behind. Wheat is the entry an allergy-minded owner looks for first, since it is among the grains most often linked with intolerance in dogs. Here it goes in at a real level, not a trace. For most puppies it is simply a cereal; for a sensitive one it is worth knowing about up front.

Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 41.2% of dry matter against the 39.0% typical of a puppy dry food. That makes it cereal-forward by a small margin. Fibre is light at 1.4% of dry matter, with dried beet pulp supplying most of it.

Calcium converts to 1.46% of dry matter, printed on the pack and inside what a growing skeleton needs. Small breed pups finish their growing quickly. A declared mineral figure you can hold against a feeding plan is genuinely useful when the whole process is over in months, not a year and a half.

Fish oil at 1.5% and flaxseed cover the omega side between them, with vegetable oil alongside naming no plant. The list closes on dried tomato pomace, dried citrus pulp and spinach powder, all sitting at trace level and there for antioxidants, not for bulk.

The added mineral panel is dosed per kilo: iron at 86.7 mg/kg, zinc at 142 mg/kg, copper at 9.4 mg/kg, manganese at 9.0 mg/kg, iodine at 3.1 mg/kg and selenium at 0.1 mg/kg. Energy comes in at 383 kcal per 100g, a touch above the 376 typical for the category, which is welcome in a bag aimed at dogs who eat in small amounts.

Sold in 1.5kg and 3kg bags.

How much of that a small breed pup gets through changes month by month, as growth speeds up and then tails away. Begin with the bag's chart and adjust by how your puppy is filling out.