Naturediet Feel Good: Chicken & Lamb review

Five cartons in the range finish in our Excellent band and sit close together, so among those five the choice comes down mostly to which animal your dog prefers. The fish carton sits a clear step back in our Good band. Wet foods as a group score well with us and the typical one occupies our Excellent band too, which puts Feel Good squarely among the company it keeps rather than out ahead of it. The declared meat share and the short, named ingredient list are what earn the placing. A fuller supplement panel and less rice are what would push it on.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken - 34%, Lamb - 26%, Rice - 10%, Carrot - 6%, Dried Seaweed

Every label declares 60% animal content and prints how it is made up. The chicken, the lamb and the fish cartons put all 60% behind one entry. The chicken and lamb carton splits it 34% to 26%, and the turkey and chicken carton splits it evenly at 30% each. On the salmon carton it is 42% salmon and 18% whitefish. Protein converts to between 35.7% and 39.1% of dry matter across the six, so the meat is doing the work in all of them.

Rice carries the starch at 10%, or 12% on the fish carton, with carrots at 6% behind it and potato at 6% taking that place in the fish. The label leaves carbohydrate out, so the figure here is an estimate on our side. It moves a fair way between recipes, from 9.6% of dry matter on the salmon to 28.3% on the fish, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. The fish carton is the outlier in both directions, lowest in fat and highest in starch.

Two entries are looser than the rest and a strict avoidance plan should notice them. The fish carton gives its animal as fish, with no species attached, and the salmon carton treats its whitefish the same way. For a dog with a general fondness for fish this makes no odds. Exclude one fish precisely and those two labels leave the door open.

Dried seaweed closes every list, sitting at trace level as a natural source of minerals and iodine, and it is the only flourish the range allows itself. The added vitamins and minerals run to vitamins A and D3, selenium, iron, copper, manganese and zinc, each with a figure printed per kilo, which is more declaration than plenty of wet labels manage. Selenium comes as sodium selenite, the form used across most of the industry.

Chicken at 34% with lamb at 26%, a middle path when some red meat in the bowl suits a dog better but all lamb is a step too far. Energy comes in a shade lower than the chicken carton at 120 kcal per 100g.

Four of the six cartons are £4.02 a kilo, with the lamb and the salmon at £4.13, all in 390g cartons sold in boxes of 18.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats roughly 689 to 1200 grams a day depending on the carton, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That ranges from £2.77 a day on the chicken to £4.82 on the fish. The fish carton carries far fewer calories per gram, and that accounts for the whole of the spread. Naturediet's own guide for a dog of that weight runs from 488 to 780 grams a day, rising to between 683 and 1170 grams on the fish.