Markus Muhle Lupo Sensitive 20/8 Dry Food review

Cold-pressed food typically earns our Good band, and this one earns it too, sitting in the upper half of that group rather than at the foot of it. A single named meat, a grain free base and an unusually specific herbal list are the strengths, and the label hides nothing behind vague headings. Two things pull the other way: chicken at 29% is a modest meat share for the category, and carbohydrate converts to 57.6% of dry matter where cold-pressed food generally runs at 43.2%. That is the trade this recipe makes for its low fat and its very plain character.

Ingredients, as declared: 36% potato flour, 29% ground dried chicken meat, ground dried parsnips, beet pulp, 5% milk thistle, 4.5% cold, pressed mixed vegetable oil (contains: linseed oil, rape oil and borage seed oil), algae powder, 1.5% salmon, oil, 1.5% dried moor, 1% healing earth, 1% dried stinging nettle, 1% dried dandelion leaves, dried Yucca, schidigera

Cold pressing suits a recipe like this one. The pellet is pressed dense at a low temperature, without the cooking and expanding an extruded biscuit goes through. The starch is never blown up that way, and the pellet breaks down in liquid where a biscuit would swell in the stomach.

Nothing else on the list is bigger than potato flour at 36%, and it is the reason the food is grain free. Potato is essentially starch with a little fibre and potassium behind it, so its job here is structural more than nutritional. Carbohydrate lands where it does mostly because of it. Parsnips and beet pulp bring the fibre along behind it.

Dried ground chicken at 29% is the only meat, and dried is the important word. The water has gone before it goes in, so 29% here counts more actual meat than the same figure on a fresh label. Apart from the salmon oil, no other animal appears anywhere. For a dog that reacts to a long cast of proteins, that simplicity is the whole point.

The herbal side is where Markus Mühle parts company with most of the shelf. Milk thistle at 5% is a traditional liver herb, dried moor is peat, and healing earth is a fine clay of the sort used to settle a stomach. Stinging nettle and dandelion leaf are old feeding traditions in Germany. None of them carries a claim on the label, and at these levels they read as character and gentle support rather than as medicine.

The fats are named in their parts. A cold-pressed vegetable oil blend at 4.5% is made from linseed, rape and borage seed oils, with salmon oil at 1.5% for the long chain omegas and algae powder alongside. That is a more considered fat package than the plain vegetable oil many labels settle for.

The additive panel is printed with doses, vitamin E at 200mg a kilo, vitamin C at 140mg, niacin at 24.1mg and the B group in full, with iron and cobalt as the minerals. Zinc, copper, manganese and iodine are not among the printed figures, so those arrive with the ingredients themselves. Calcium works out at 1.3% of dry matter, comfortable for an adult dog.

It is sold in 15kg bags.

Reckon on about 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). Set against this food's estimated energy, that comes to roughly 260 grams a day.