Morrisons Chief Dry Senior review

Our scoring settles this in the Poor band, two bands below the Good the typical adult dry food manages. The reason runs through the whole Chief line. Cereals, oils and fats and derivatives of vegetable origin name nothing, and the meat is only 4% accounted for. Very little on the panel can be verified by the person doing the feeding. Protein at 22.8% of dry matter and a high carbohydrate share hold nutritional balance down as well, so three of the four pillars finish Poor. Read that as a problem with the label and not with the bowl. It is a complete food with a full mineral panel, a sensibly low fat level for a quieter dog and two joint ingredients printed with figures beside them.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives (25%, Including 4% Chicken, 0.025% Chondroitin), Oils and Fats, Vegetables (0.5% Dried Peas, Equivalent to 4% Peas), Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Minerals, Molluscs and Crustaceans (0.025% Glucosamine)

Cereals leads, which puts grain at the centre of the recipe without naming which grain. That covers a very wide field, from decent whole cereals through to milling by-products, and it also means the mix can be reworked between batches. Most older dogs will eat it without a murmur; the catch is simply that there is nothing to check if one does not.

Meat and animal derivatives at 25% is the meat, with 4% of the food declared as chicken. Chicken is easy to digest and reliably popular with dogs, and it is also the meat most often behind a food intolerance, which makes naming it useful information. The remaining meat sits under a heading that legally spans the fleshy parts and processing products of any warm-blooded land animal, so the panel gives no way of telling what else is in there.

The senior thinking shows in two places. Chondroitin at 0.025% sits inside the meat declaration and glucosamine at the same figure comes in through molluscs and crustaceans, shellfish shells being where most supplemented glucosamine starts life. These are small helpings, not therapeutic doses, and each is printed with a number. Many labels do not go that far. Fat is the other senior move, held down to 8.2% of dry matter for a dog whose walks are shorter now.

Moisture is not declared, so the dry matter conversions here assume the 8% a dry food usually holds. On that basis protein reads 22.8% and estimated carbohydrate 57.0%, against 46.2% for the typical adult dry food. Most of the bowl is plant material. Calcium comes out at 2.39% of dry matter with ash at 8.2%, the fuller reading you would expect from a cereal base carrying a heavy mineral supplement. The 321 kcal per 100g is our estimate, since the label prints no energy figure of its own.

The additive panel is complete and dosed throughout. Vitamins A and D3 have a figure beside each and vitamin E is at 70mg per kilo. Zinc is at 100mg, iron at 60mg, manganese at 50mg, copper at 8mg, iodine at 2.5mg and selenium at 0.1mg. The trace elements are oxides and sulphates, not chelated forms, taken up a little less efficiently but entirely standard for the shelf.

£1.20 a kilo, sold in a 2.5kg bag.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, needing about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75), that comes to around 262 grams and £0.31 a day. This is a small breed recipe, and its own table asks 95 to 155 grams for a dog between 5kg and 10kg, which is where most dogs eating it will actually sit.