Nature's Protection Superior Care Red Coat Adult Small Breed: With Salmon review

Both varieties land in the Good band on our reading, the same place an ordinary adult dry food finishes. Two things carry them there. The meat declaration is generous for a small breed food at 40% and 44%, and it is dried meat, not fresh. Very little of that declared figure is lost by the time the kibble is made. Transparency reads Excellent on both labels and protein and processing Average on each, while nutritional balance splits: Good for the salmon, Average for the lamb. Protein is the number holding the total down. Once the mineral content is taken into account it is solid without being large.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon 44 %(dry and finely ground), dehydrated potato pulp, peas, sweet potato, bird fat, krill flour (4 %), sugar beet pulp, salmon oil, monocalcic phosphate, dynamic micronized clinophyllolite (1 %), linaza, fructooligosaccharides (FOS), cassava extract, dry blueberry, dry calendula (lutein source)

Both labels open with a meat percentage worth having, 40% lamb on one and 44% salmon on the other. Each is declared dry and finely ground. Dried meat goes on the scales with its water already gone, so what you read near the top of the list is much what ends up in the biscuit. Protein converts to 28.6% of dry matter on the lamb and 29.7% on the salmon.

There is no cereal in either recipe. Dehydrated potato pulp leads the plant side with sweet potato and peas behind it, and cassava extract does the binding a grain would otherwise do. Carbohydrate is estimated at 41.1% of dry matter on the lamb and 39.0% on the salmon. Both sit under the 46.2% adult dry food usually runs at.

The colour thinking lives in the additives panel. The doses are 500 mg of L-tyrosine, 1 g of L-cystine and 500 mg of L-tryptophan, and the first two are the raw material a dog's body works from when it builds coat pigment. Genetics decide what colour a coat is in the first place, so the fair way to read these is as keeping a pathway well supplied, not as repainting anything.

Krill flour at 4% is the marine anchor, with salmon oil beside it and linseed bringing omega 3 in its plant form. That combination is doing most of the skin and coat work in these recipes. It is also why neither one can be described as fish free.

Fibre is the sugar beet pulp's job, and FOS looks after the bacteria lower down the gut. Clinoptilolite at 1% binds, and it is no kind of nutrient. Dried calendula is there for lutein. Selenium is supplied as sodium selenite, which is the form most makers choose and the less easily absorbed of the two the rules allow.

Salmon at 44%, the largest single meat declaration in the range, with dried blueberry in the tail and monocalcium phosphate supplying minerals. Fat is the richer reading of the two at 18.7% of dry matter, and every animal ingredient here bar the bird fat comes out of the sea.

£6.50 a kilo, sold in 1.5kg bags.

On our standard basis of a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needing around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75), the lamb works out at roughly 240 grams a day, or £1.56. The salmon comes to 231 grams, or £1.50. A small breed adult will of course eat less than that, by a good margin. The energy figures are estimates and not declarations, so let the daily amount be a starting point and the waistline the check.