Lifestage Grain Free Raw: Venison review

Seven recipes, seven places in our Outstanding band, and the typical adult raw food wears that band word too. No category we cover asks more than raw, and the real achievement here is seven recipes clearing it, each on a different animal. Every recipe reads Outstanding on all four pillars: protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value. The Chicken and the Beef edge ahead of the rest, by margins far too small to shop on.

Ingredients, as declared: Venison with bone (35%), chicken with bone (20%), beef tripe (15%), chicken heart (5%), chicken liver (5%), green vegetables (10%), carrots (8.5%), blueberries (1%), salmon oil (0.3%), kelp, wheat grass powder.

The arithmetic never changes. Animal ingredients take 80% of every tub, using three to five named entries. Green vegetables at 10%, carrots at 8.5% and blueberries at 1% fill the plant side. Salmon oil at 0.3%, kelp and wheat grass powder close the list. Because nothing starchy goes in, the carbohydrate estimate reads zero right across the range.

What sets these recipes apart from most raw is how much of the animal share goes to organ meat. The Beef is 30% lung and 30% tripe before any muscle meat arrives; the Lamb leads on tripe at 30% and lung at 25%; the Wild Boar pairs its headline meat with 30% beef tripe. Tripe is the ruminant stomach, and it digests easily and is rich in fats and enzymes. Organs generally are where an animal's own vitamin and mineral load is concentrated, which matters in recipes with no premix behind them.

Wheat grass powder is the entry that raises an eyebrow in a range with grain free on the front. It is the young leaf of the plant, harvested long before the seed head forms, so what it brings is chlorophyll and greens with no starch or gluten. Worth knowing all the same if wheat in any form is the thing you are keeping off the list, because it appears on all seven labels.

Green vegetables at 10% is the one general phrase in an otherwise specific list, which leaves room for the mix to shift with the season. Everything else is named, down to the 0.3% of salmon oil, and that oil is doing the omega 3 work that a lean, muscle-led raw recipe would otherwise miss.

Two recipes carry more than the base build. The Chicken and the Turkey each print glucosamine at 400 mg/kg and chondroitin at 300 mg/kg, real doses rather than a nod. The other five leave joint support to the bone and cartilage in the grind. No recipe prints a calcium figure, so bone content is read from the ingredients and from ash. That converts to as little as 5.5% of dry matter on the Beef and as much as 16.0% on the Venison.

Venison with bone at 35% joined by chicken with bone at 20%, beef tripe at 15%, and chicken heart and liver at 5% each. Ash converts to 16.0% of dry matter, the largest bone share in the range, at 113.5 kcal per 100g.

All seven recipes are £6.00 a kilo, and all seven come in a 500g tub.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. On that basis the Chicken costs £2.84 a day and the Lamb £5.42. Nothing changes between them except energy density: the leanest recipes feed in the biggest portions at the same rate per kilo.