JosiDog Active review

JosiDog Active comes out in our Good band, and most of the adult dry category finishes there as well. That is ordinary company and not a warning. The recipe does the important thing first by putting a dried meat entry at the head of the list. It does not climb higher because the label says so little about that entry. No percentage is printed against any ingredient, the bird is never named, and the moisture figure is missing, so the dry matter reading rests on the standard 8% assumption for a kibble.

Ingredients, as declared: dried poultry protein; whole grain maize; rice; poultry fat; beet fibre; hydrolysed poultry protein; minerals

Seven entries is a short list by modern standards, and short lists have their virtues. There is very little here for a worried owner to look up. The fewer moving parts a recipe has, the easier it is to work out what disagreed with your dog if something ever does.

Dried poultry protein takes the top slot, and dried is the useful word. The water was driven off before it reached the mixer. That means its place near the top is a fair reflection of what is in the finished kibble. Behind it, whole grain maize and rice carry the starch. Maize gets a rough press in some quarters, but a properly cooked, ground maize is digested well by the large majority of dogs and brings useful energy with it.

Protein converts to 27.2% of dry matter and fat to 18.5%, which is a genuinely energetic profile, and the food runs at 394 kcal per 100 grams. Carbohydrate estimates out at 45.4% of dry matter, marginally under the 46.2% typical for adult dry food. Beet fibre is the only entry doing gut work, and it does that quietly by giving the large intestine something to ferment.

Hydrolysed poultry protein sits low on the list and is there for taste. Hydrolysing breaks a protein into small fragments, which makes it intensely savoury to a dog, and it is a common way of making a plain kibble worth finishing. The mineral pack behind it is dosed in print, with zinc arriving at 150 mg per kilo as a glycine chelate and iron at 175 mg per kilo.

The one real gap is disclosure. Every animal entry says poultry, and no percentage is attached to anything at all, so a reader cannot tell whether the meat share is generous or merely first past the post. For most dogs eating happily that is an academic complaint. It only bites if you need to prove that a particular bird is or is not in the bowl.

£2.53 a kilo. Sold in 900g bags, in multipacks of the same and in a 15kg sack.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 213 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to around £0.54 a day. The label asks 230 grams for a 20kg dog. Feed to your dog's waistline and treat the chart as a starting point.