Lifestage Adult Dry Food: Fish & Brown Rice review

The lamb and turkey recipes finish together in our Good band, matching the typical adult dry food, while the fish sits a band below them in Average. What lifts them is a combination of a large named animal share and a label that prints a percentage against almost every line. The lamb declares the biggest animal total and reads Good on protein and processing with transparency Outstanding, and the turkey matches it for transparency while reading Average on protein and processing. The fish recipe carries a comparable amount of animal material but never says which fish, and it runs the highest starch load of the three. It is the only one here to pair Average protein and processing with Poor nutritional balance, and it settles one band lower than the other two.

Ingredients, as declared: Fish (30%), Fish Meal (15%), Freshly Prepared Fish (10%), Fish Gravy (3%), Fish Oil (2%), White Rice (23%), Brown Rice (20%), Barley (18%), Linseed (3%), Peas (2%), Alfalfa, Sunflower Oil, Vegetable Stock, Minerals, Seaweed, Omega 3 Supplement, Fructooligosaccharides (Fos), Chicory Extract, Yucca Extract, Dandelion

Each recipe leads with its animal as one headline percentage and then shows the working underneath. The lamb totals 34%, made up of 25% lamb meal with 4% freshly prepared lamb, then 3% lamb fat and 2% lamb gravy. Turkey is assembled the same way to 32% and the fish to 30%. Meal is the dried form, so its protein goes straight into the kibble and the oven cannot take most of its weight away. Seeing it broken out line by line is unusually open labelling.

The grain side is a deliberate choice, not an afterthought. Brown rice appears in all three and is paired with white rice, with barley behind it in the fish and lamb and oats in the turkey. Barley brings fibre and a useful spread of trace nutrients although it does carry gluten, while oats are among the gentler grains on a dog once cooked. Carbohydrate runs high across the range even so, estimated at between 53.2% and 58.7% of dry matter where the typical adult dry food sits at 46.2%.

Linseed at 3% runs through every recipe as a plant source of omega 3, with a separate omega 3 supplement listed further down. That second entry is not attributed to anything, so a fish avoiding household is on trust here. The fish recipe of course adds fish oil at 2% quite openly.

The shared tail is a sensible one. Seaweed brings iodine along with a wide mineral spread. Chicory extract and fructo-oligosaccharides are prebiotic fibres, and the friendly bacteria low in the gut are what they feed. Yucca extract is there to soften what comes out at the far end. Alfalfa and dandelion sit at seasoning level.

Every bag prints a dose against its added minerals: zinc at 100 mg, iron at 50 mg, manganese at 20 mg and copper at 15 mg per kilo, with iodine supplied as calcium iodate. Zinc arrives as the oxide rather than a chelate, and the oxide is the less readily absorbed of the two forms, while selenium comes as sodium selenite. Vitamin D3 is the figure that moves between recipes, at 500 IU per kilo in the fish and 2,750 IU in the lamb and turkey. The fish carries the highest vitamin A of the three.

Fish totals 30%, broken into 15% fish meal, 10% freshly prepared fish, 3% fish gravy and 2% fish oil. White rice at 23%, brown rice at 20% and barley at 18% sit behind it, with peas at 2%. It is the highest in starch of the three at an estimated 58.7% of dry matter and the lowest in protein at 21.7%. It is also the only recipe here that never names the species it is built on. No other recipe here reads Average on protein and processing and Poor on nutritional balance at the same time, and that is what places it a band below them. The fish oil is a genuine plus for skin and coat, being the marine form of omega 3 that a dog can use directly.

£2.75 a kilo across all three flavours, sold in 2kg and 12kg bags.

A 15kg adult in moderate condition, taken at about 840 kcal a day on the standard 110 × bodyweight^0.75 maintenance estimate, would eat between 250 and 257 grams a day depending on the flavour. That comes to between £0.69 and £0.71 a day.