Innocent Hound Air-Dried Food: Gourmet Chicken Hotpot review

The whole range lands in our Good band, the six of them finishing close enough that no one recipe pulls away from the rest. Semi-moist food has no cohort for us to hold this range up against, so the reading rests entirely on the labels themselves. A high named meat share and a properly itemised list lift every recipe, while the estimated carbohydrate and the leaner analyses on the duck and the chicken hold a few of them back. Transparency reads Outstanding right across the six and protein and processing reads Good throughout, so what separates one recipe from another here is the analysis rather than the shopping list.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken(70%), dried sweet potato (12.5%), rapeseed glycerine, dried potato, minerals, dried carrot (1%), dried thyme (1%), dried chicory root, fibre, beet pulp

All six labels open on 70% of one British meat, and that figure carries more weight here than it would on a bag of kibble. Nothing has been baked down to a crumb, so what the label counts is close to what lands in the bowl, and the analyses follow the animal rather than a house formula. Protein converts to between 25.6% and 36.0% of dry matter across the six, with fat ranging from 9.3% on the salmon to 24.7% on the beef.

Rapeseed glycerine sits high on every list and is the reason the pieces stay soft in the pouch. It is a humectant, holding moisture inside the food without letting that moisture spoil it, and it brings a mild sweetness that most dogs take to quickly. Naming the plant it came from is a small courtesy plenty of labels skip.

Sweet potato does most of the carbohydrate work, declared at 12.5% on the beef, pork and chicken recipes with dried potato behind it. The lamb and the salmon take a different road, swapping in banana, apple and seaweed. The lamb alone adds pea protein, a concentrated plant protein that lifts the protein figure without any of it coming from the named animal.

Chicory root appears on all six, usually at 1%. Its inulin is a soluble fibre, and the gut's useful bacteria live on it. Beet pulp works alongside it as a steady, well tolerated fibre. The herbs are there for character, not substance: rosemary and carrot on the beef, sage on the pork, thyme on the chicken, cranberry on the duck, all declared at a percent or less.

The added panel keeps the same shape on each recipe and it is properly dosed. Taurine is printed with a figure on every label, at 985mg on the pork, a heart-supporting amino acid most dogs can make for themselves and a welcome sight when a label prints it. DL-methionine follows in the same panel, with vitamins A, D3 and E ahead of a full set of trace elements, and vitamin E reaching 189mg on the duck. Worth knowing that the salmon label alone prints no vitamin D3 and no selenium.

Chicken at 70% with thyme and carrot at 1%, on the same sweet potato and dried potato base as the beef. Fat is gentlest here, converting to 12.5% of dry matter at 271 kcal per 100g, so a dog on a watched waistline is well served. The carbohydrate estimate is the highest of the six at 46.5%.

£21.67 a kilo across the whole range, sold in a 1.5kg pouch and a 3kg box.

Working from about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets through between 247 and 310 grams a day, depending on the recipe. That lands between £5.35 and £6.72 a day, with the richer recipes feeding in smaller amounts.