Naturediet Feel Good Grain Free: Lamb review

All three cartons finish in our Outstanding band, within a whisker of each other. No recipe is stronger than the others, so pick the animal your dog gets on with. Wet food does well on our scoring generally, and this range clears the Excellent band where the middle of the wet shelf settles. The meat share is printed, the starch is small and named, and nothing on the label is doing a job it cannot explain.

Ingredients, as declared: Lamb - 60%, Carrot - 3.5%, Potato - 3.5%, Parsnip - 3%, Dried Egg, Dried Seaweed

Each carton opens with its animal content at 60%, given as a percentage rather than left to guesswork. The chicken and the lamb each put one named meat to all of that work, while the salmon carton runs salmon at 42% with whitefish at 18% behind it. Protein converts to 35.7% of dry matter on the chicken and lamb and 38.5% on the salmon. For food fed from a carton, the analysis is properly meat-led.

The plant side is deliberately small. Carrot sits at 3.5%, potato at 3.5% and parsnip at 3%, each with a figure beside it. Cereal is nowhere on the three labels, so the grain-free claim holds the whole way down the list. No carbohydrate figure is declared, so ours is an estimate. It converts to 17.9% of dry matter on the chicken. The lamb reads 19.7% and the salmon 9.6%. The typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%.

Dried egg and dried seaweed close every label. Egg is a genuinely useful protein and brings fat and minerals in with it. Seaweed is the quiet mineral source in recipes like this one, iodine included. That is why it turns up at trace level in so many natural foods. Neither is present in quantity, but both are worth noticing if you keep an avoidance list.

The added vitamins and minerals amount to a short panel with a printed figure against every entry, covering vitamins A and D3 and the trace metals iron, copper, manganese and zinc. A recipe carrying this much fresh meat brings a fair share of its micronutrition with it, so a panel this brief reads as confidence rather than as economy.

Lamb at 60% on the same vegetable base, for a dog that has been moved off poultry or has simply grown tired of it. A touch less ash than the chicken and slightly more carbohydrate at an estimated 19.7% of dry matter, with energy matching at 122 kcal per 100g.

The chicken carton is £4.02 a kilo and the lamb and salmon cartons are £4.13, all in the same 390g carton sold in boxes of 18.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs roughly 689 to 739 grams a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Depending on the carton, that comes to between £2.77 and £3.05 a day. Naturediet's own chart puts that dog between 488 and 780 grams a day.