Iams Advanced Nutrition Adult Large Breed: With Fresh Chicken review

Both recipes land in the Good band on our scoring, with the lamb a shade behind the chicken. The median adult dry food finishes in the Good band as well, so both bags are running with the pack rather than behind it.

Neither is held back by anything alarming. The animal content arrives largely as a dried meal, and the fresh chicken loses its water in the oven. Barley and maize carry a good share of the finished kibble, and that is what pushes carbohydrate past the typical figure for a dry food. Give it to a settled big adult that likes poultry, the dog it was drawn up for, and it does the job.

Ingredients, as declared: dried chicken and turkey 22% (including chicken 13%), barley, maize, fresh chicken (10%), maize flour, pork fat, dried beet pulp (2.5%), chicken gravy, minerals (including sodium hexametaphosphate 0.35%), linseed, fructooligosaccharides (0.2%), brewer's dried yeast.

Both recipes open with dried chicken and turkey, 22% for the chicken bag and 24% for the lamb. Each prints the chicken share inside that, 13% and 15% respectively. A dried meat is the honest workhorse of a kibble like this. Its water went in the drying, so the declaration arrives in the bowl close to as written. The chicken recipe then adds 10% fresh chicken, which reads generously on the label but cooks down to a fraction of that weight.

Barley and maize follow, with maize flour behind them, and between them they carry the starch. Cooked barley is easily digested and brings fibre and trace minerals with it. It is a gluten grain, though, and a household steering clear of gluten should know that. Protein converts to 25.0% of dry matter in both bags. Carbohydrate reaches 51.8% in the chicken bag. The lamb comes in at 51.6%.

Pork fat supplies the added fat. It is a named animal fat, not the vague sort, and that is the better way round. Pork is also a meat that plenty of dogs have barely met. Linseed sits lower down as the plant omega 3 source. Firm stools are the job of the dried beet pulp at 2.5%.

The small print does a good deal here. Sodium hexametaphosphate at 0.35% sits in the mineral mix and softens tartar as the kibble is chewed. Fructooligosaccharides at 0.2% are a prebiotic fibre feeding the gut bacteria, and brewer's dried yeast brings a useful set of B vitamins. Vitamin A is dosed at 23000IU per kilo, vitamin E at 135mg, zinc at 115mg and iron at 69mg, all printed and none of it implied.

The trace mineral forms are the standard sulphates and oxides rather than the chelates you see on smaller ranges, and selenium comes as sodium selenite at 0.08mg per kilo. That is a very small dose of a mineral dogs need in very small amounts. Most kibbles use the same form.

Energy is the same in both bags at 372 kcal per 100 grams, so a dog swapping between the two needs no change to the scoop.

This is the bag with fresh chicken in it, 10% of it, sitting on top of 22% dried chicken and turkey. Ash reads 5.9%, marginally the lower of the two, and with no red meat anywhere on its list it is the simpler starting point for a dog whose history you do not know.

The chicken recipe is sold in 2kg, 3kg and 12kg bags, and the lamb comes in 12kg only.

The label's own table asks 330 grams a day for a 25kg dog, 425 grams at 35kg, 515 grams at 45kg and 600 grams at 55kg. Use scales, not your eye, and let the dog's waistline decide the rest.