Icepaw Reset Pure 23/11 review

Our reading places this in our Average band, one step below the Good band the median adult dry food occupies.

What holds it there is easy enough to point at. Rice in three grinds does a great deal of the carrying, carbohydrate ends up above the 46.2% typical of an adult dry food, and the fat goes unnamed. What it gets right is a single named fish at the front, moisture declared on the label and an additive panel dosed line by line.

Ingredients, as declared: Fish meal (herring) 23%, rice 22%, rice flour 22%, animal fat, broken rice 6%, salmon oil 4%, dried beet pulp, linseed oil 0.20%, glucosamine HCI 0.01%, yucca schidigera 0.01%

The whole animal story is herring fish meal at 23%. Naming the fish, when the label could have said fish meal and stopped, is a good habit to see. Fish meal is a concentrated way to buy protein, most of its water having left before it reaches the mixer. Herring brings its own oils along with it.

Rice does the rest of the work: rice at 22%, rice flour at 22% and broken rice at 6%. Broken rice is simply grain that fractured during milling, nutritionally the same as the whole thing. As cereals go, rice is one of the gentler ones for a dog to break down. The consequence is carbohydrate at 51.9% of dry matter, above what an adult dry food usually runs.

Protein at 23% and fat at 11% are what set this apart from the fuller version of the recipe, converting to 25.3% and 12.1% of dry matter. That makes for a gentler bowl. It is useful for the dog who gains weight just looking at a biscuit, and a reason to keep the scoop honest for the one that burns through everything it eats.

Salmon oil at 4% and linseed oil at 0.20% supply the omega 3s, marine and plant respectively, and dried beet pulp adds the fibre that holds a stool together. Yucca schidigera at 0.01% is the familiar small entry aimed at stool odour rather than nutrition.

The vitamin and mineral panel is thorough for a recipe this short. Taurine at 2000mg per kilo, vitamin E at 330mg, vitamin C at 200mg and a full B group are all printed with figures beside them, vitamin B12 included at 72 micrograms. Cobalt appears at 1mg, which plenty of labels leave out. Selenium comes as sodium selenite at 0.3mg, the form the great majority of kibbles use.

The gap is the same one the range carries throughout: animal fat, with no species named. On a label where everything else is specific it stands out, and it matters only if you are working to keep a particular meat out of your dog's diet.

£9.83 a kilo, sold in a 2kg bag.

Take a 15kg adult in moderate condition needing around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate) and the daily figure comes to about £2.43, on roughly 248 grams of food. The label carries no portion table of its own, so weigh it out and watch the waistline for the first fortnight.