Natures Menu Complete & Balanced 60/40 Nuggets: Fish & Chicken review

The Beef and Chicken and the Tripe & Chicken with Salmon both edge into our Outstanding band, while the other four finish a whisker behind them in Excellent. That is a tight spread, so the animals involved should decide this rather than the ranking. A typical raw food earns the Outstanding band too, and the brown rice is why most of this range sits fractionally under that mark. Carbohydrate converts to between 25.0% and 36.4% of dry matter here, where the raw field usually keeps it near 5.0%. Protein and processing and transparency read Outstanding on every recipe. Nutritional balance ranges between Good and Outstanding, while value follows each recipe's own overall reading.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 34%, Brown Rice 19%, Salmon 16%, White Fish 10%, Peas 8%, Carrots 5%, Swede 5%, Pea Fibre, Minerals, Yucca, Green Tea

A nugget is the same mince pressed into a bite sized piece and frozen, and that is the whole appeal. You take out the number you need and let them thaw. Nothing has to be sawn off a block or weighed out of a tub. It also makes trying a new recipe on one meal genuinely easy.

The pattern behind every recipe is fixed: named meat and fish to 60%, brown rice, peas at 8%, then carrots and swede at 5% apiece. Closing the list are pea fibre, added minerals, green tea and yucca. Percentages are printed against everything worth printing them against.

The rice sits between 16% and 19% across the range. It is a whole grain and it arrives with fibre and B vitamins alongside its starch. Plenty of dogs simply do better on a bowl that is not entirely meat, and this is the version of raw built with them in mind.

The tripe, chicken heart, liver and salmon recipe is the standout on ingredients. Heart at 15% and liver at 5%, both from chicken, put a real organ share in the bowl. Most of an animal's micronutrition sits in its organs. Tripe at 25% is the sort of thing most dogs treat as a reward.

The mineral panel is printed per kilo and itemised, with zinc at 18.3mg, copper at 1.8mg and iodine at 0.26mg among the entries. Selenium comes from an inactivated selenised yeast. The organic form is a considered choice, and most labels default to a plain salt.

Read as dry matter, protein lands between 32.4% and 36.7% and fat between 18.2% and 27.3%, both leaner than an eighty per cent meat recipe would give you. Energy ranges from 130 to 165 kcal per 100g, so a move between recipes is worth a glance at the scoop.

Chicken leads at 34%, and the fish behind it is salmon at 16% with white fish at 10%. Protein converts to 33.3% of dry matter and energy sits mid range at 153 kcal per 100g. If marine oils suit your dog, this is the natural pick.

The nuggets come in 1kg bags, and the price is £5.49 a kilo across the range.

Maintenance for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition is about 840 kcal a day, using the standard 110 × bodyweight^0.75 estimate. Feeding that comes out at between £2.79 and £3.55 a day depending on the recipe. The Beef and Chicken reaches that energy on 509 grams a day, while the Chicken with Salmon, the lightest of the six, needs 646 grams.