Honey's Raw Lean: Duck review

All five recipes finish in our Outstanding band, with the Pork a shade ahead of the rest. Raw is the hardest field we score and its middle sits in that same band. Holding that standard while deliberately stripping fat out of the recipes is worth noticing, because lean foods usually give something up somewhere to get there. Transparency reads Good on the Beef and Tripe and Outstanding on the other four, while protein and processing, nutritional balance and value read Outstanding on all five. A single named animal per tub, vegetables named individually instead of lumped under one word, and an analysis with nothing hidden in it are what carry that.

Ingredients, as declared: Minced free range duck and finely minced bone (67%). Minced carrot, cabbage, cauliflower, parsnip and other seasonal vegetables (33%).

Lean here comes from the recipe itself, and not from a smaller scoop. Honey's reaches for cuts that carry less fat to begin with: turkey necks, washed beef tripe with heart and flank, free range duck, free range pork with heart and pasture fed lamb with heart. Each is minced with its own bone and each takes 67% of the tub.

Washed tripe is the most interesting entry in the range. Tripe is a grazing animal's stomach lining. It is high in protein, easy on the gut and famously popular with dogs that are difficult about plainer meat. Washing it takes down the pungency that puts some owners off while leaving the digestibility alone. In the Beef and Tripe it arrives with heart and flank from the same animal, so the single-meat reading holds throughout.

Carrot, cabbage, cauliflower and parsnip make up the vegetable third by name, with other seasonal vegetables allowed alongside them. In a lean recipe that fraction is doing real work, filling the bowl and carrying fibre so a dog on a reduced ration still finishes its dinner feeling fed.

Nothing is added anywhere. No premix, no oil and no botanical tail, which is Honey's stated position across everything it makes. So everything the dog gets by way of micronutrients comes out of the tub itself, the meat, the bone ground through it and the vegetables. Each animal brings a slightly different set to the bowl, which is the best argument for rotating through all five.

The analyses show what lean actually means here. Fat converts to between 15.4% and 33.5% of dry matter, well under what most raw food carries, and energy runs from 94 to 123 kcal per 100g against a raw typical of 155. Protein holds up at between 44.2% and 60.9%, so these recipes are cutting the fat rather than cutting the meat, which is the distinction that matters on a weight plan.

Carbohydrate is estimated by difference, and on the Duck it comes out at 17.5% of dry matter with the Pork at 11.9%. With nothing starchy in either tub, those figures sweep up everything the analysis does not measure, and they are no sign of filler. Read the ingredients list for the better guide. Crude ash tells a similar story, converting to between 6.2% and 18.0% of dry matter, which is the ground bone showing through. The Lamb tops that range, and no calcium percentage is printed anywhere to check it against.

Minced free range duck with finely minced bone at 67%. It is the leanest tub in the range, fat converting to just 18.3% of dry matter at 94 kcal per 100g. That also means the largest helpings of any recipe here and the most freezer space taken up.

Per kilo, the Duck is £7.34, the Turkey £7.80, the Pork £8.66, the Beef and Tripe £9.50 and the Lamb £10.00. Every recipe comes in 250g and 500g tubs.

Against the standard maintenance estimate of 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75), a day is £5.71 on the Turkey. The Beef and Tripe comes to £7.43. These are light recipes, so the daily amounts are large, between 684 and 892 grams, and it is the amount that sets the daily figure.