Honey's Certified Organic: Lamb review

Our Outstanding band takes in the pork and the turkey, while the lamb and the beef read Excellent and the chicken Good, so the five do separate out a little. No field we score is stronger than raw, and its middle already sits in our Outstanding band. The pork and the turkey meet the highest standard in the hardest category, and carry organic certification through every ingredient as well. Protein and processing and transparency both read Outstanding on all but the chicken. Value follows each tub's own reading: Outstanding for the pork and the turkey, Excellent for the beef and lamb, Good for the chicken. The label is not the problem here. Mineral readings run high and protein figures are moderate by raw standards, and that analysis is what stops the five climbing higher.

Ingredients, as declared: Minced organic lamb including finely minced bone (67%). Minced carrot, cabbage and parsnip or kohl rabi (33%).

This range exists because of the organic certification, so it pays to be precise about what that buys you. It is a sourcing standard rather than a nutrition one, covering how the animals were raised and how the vegetables were grown. Here it applies to both halves of the tub, not to the headline meat alone. Whether that matters to you is a question about how you shop, and if it does, very few raw ranges can answer it this completely.

The build is the same in every tub: 67% minced organic meat with the bone minced finely through it, and 33% minced organic vegetables. The Beef and the Pork also carry heart in the meat fraction. The five labels carry nothing else at all, which puts them among the shortest ingredient lists you will read anywhere in raw feeding.

The vegetable third is carrot, cabbage and then parsnip or kohl rabi, with the Turkey allowing other seasonal organic vegetables alongside. Kohl rabi is a mild brassica with a texture somewhere between cabbage stalk and turnip, and it is an unusual thing to find named on a dog food label at all. The either-or clause does mean the tub changes slightly with the season, so a very sensitive dog is worth watching through a changeover.

No premix and no added oil appear anywhere in the range, and Honey's takes that position on everything it makes. Micronutrition therefore has to come from the meat itself, from the finely minced bone and from the vegetables. That is the strongest argument for rotating through all five.

The analysis carries the marks of a bone-in whole-food recipe. Crude ash converts to between 7.3% and 18.8% of dry matter, a very wide spread for five recipes built to one pattern, and it is the finely minced bone the figure is measuring. Protein converts to between 30.9% and 46.7% of dry matter and fat to between 31.2% and 51.2%, so the five differ a good deal more in the bowl than they do on the label. Carbohydrate reaches 8.6% of dry matter at most against a raw typical of 5.0%, and every energy figure here is an estimate.

Minced organic lamb at 67% with the bone through it, and much the richest tub of the five, fat converting to 51.2% of dry matter at 179 kcal per 100g. It also declares crude fibre at 5.6%, which converts to 17.0% of dry matter and is an unusually high reading for a raw food, so introduce it gently to a dog with a delicate gut.

Per kilo, the Turkey is £11.20, the Chicken £12.40, the Pork £13.18, the Beef £13.32 and the Lamb £16.12. All five come in 500g tubs, and the Chicken is sold in a 250g tub as well.

On the standard maintenance estimate for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75), a day's feeding is £7.48 on the Turkey and £8.72 on the Pork. Energy density shuffles that order: the Lamb sits highest per kilo but feeds in the smallest portion of the five, so it does not land at the top of the daily figures.