Natural Greatness Ultra Premium Adult Medium & Large Breed review

Our scoring puts this one in the Good band, which is where most adult dry kibble ends up. It gets there honestly. The salmon share is genuine, the joint doses are printed and transparency reads Outstanding, though the meat total is only moderate once the dehydrated and fresh entries are added together. Read as an everyday bowl for a medium or large adult who likes fish, it still stacks up well.

Ingredients, as declared: Dehydrated Salmon (20%), Potato, Fresh Salmon (10%), Potato protein, Poultry fat (9.5%), Yeast, Beet pulp, Hydrolysed salmon (2%), Salmon oil (1.5%), Linseed, Mineral Substances, Glucosamine 650 mg/kg, Chicory, Mannan-oligosaccharides, Extract citrus (grapefruit, orange, tangerine and bergamot), Chondroitin 150 mg/kg, Yucca schidigera.

Dehydrated salmon at 20% does the heavy lifting. Dried fish has given up its water before weighing, so it arrives in the kibble near the weight the label claims. The fresh salmon at 10% behind it will shrink considerably in the oven, and hydrolysed salmon at 2% and salmon oil at 1.5% top the fish content up further down. Protein converts to 30.4% of dry matter and carbohydrate to 41.3%, comfortably under the 46.2% the typical adult dry food runs at.

The only starch is potato, so the grain free claim stands and no pea appears at all. Potato protein in fourth place is the entry worth noticing. It is a byproduct of potato processing that lifts the protein figure, and no plant protein brings the amino acid profile a dog gets from meat. Yeast and beet pulp follow, the second of those a familiar source of gentle fermentable fibre.

Poultry fat at 9.5% is the single vague entry on a list that otherwise names everything. Poultry can mean chicken, duck, goose or turkey. The label never says which, so a dog being kept off one particular bird cannot be called safe here. For the great majority of dogs it makes no practical difference, and animal fat is what a dog is built to use. It is still the reason the food reads less transparently than its salmon headline suggests.

This recipe earns ground back in the small print. Glucosamine at 650 mg/kg and chondroitin at 150 mg/kg are given real doses. Taurine is in at 1000 mg for heart support, and the salmon oil has linseed beside it for plant omega 3s. Chicory and mannan-oligosaccharides are prebiotics that feed the useful gut bacteria, and a citrus extract of grapefruit, orange, tangerine and bergamot rounds things off as an antioxidant. Zinc comes in as the oxide at 120 mg and selenium as sodium selenite at 0.12 mg, standard industry forms rather than the more readily absorbed chelates.

At 388 kcal per 100g with 17.4% fat on a dry matter basis, this is an energy dense food. That suits a working or genuinely active dog well, and it simply means a smaller bowl for a large dog whose exercise is a gentle wander round the park.

Sold in 2kg and 10kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 216 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). For a dog of that weight taking under an hour of exercise, the label's own table asks 150 grams. Let the dog's own shape decide when the two figures disagree.