Natures Menu Complete & Balanced 80/20 Nuggets: Turkey with Venison review

All eleven recipes sit in our Outstanding band, with the Beef at the head of them and the Goose & Turkey just behind. Consistency on that scale is the real achievement, because a raw food has to be very good indeed to reach our top band, and this range manages it eleven times over. The typical raw food shares that band. Read this as a range holding the highest standard in the strongest category we cover, without running away with it. Protein and processing reads Outstanding on every recipe, and so do nutritional balance and transparency. Value reads Outstanding across the range as well.

Ingredients, as declared: Turkey 70%, Venison 10%, Blueberry 4%, Swede 4%, Carrot 4%, Peas 2%, Pea Fibre, Minerals, Yeast Products (as a source of prebiotic MOS and beta glucans) (0.016%), Yucca, Green Tea

The rule never bends: 80% named meat or fish, a fruit at 4%, and a short vegetable fraction. Then come yucca, green tea and added minerals, with pea fibre and a trace of yeast product at the end. Because the build is fixed, moving a dog between recipes is unusually painless, and the nugget format lets you do it one meal at a time.

The animal list is what sets this range apart. Rabbit, venison, goose, pork and duck are all here. If your dog has reacted to the everyday meats, that breadth is worth a great deal. Venison and rabbit in particular are animals most dogs have never eaten, and that is precisely what a fresh start needs. Both come paired with turkey, so read the list before you rely on either for an exclusion trial.

The fruit changes with the animal. Blueberry goes with the fish and with the venison, cranberry with the rabbit, raspberry with the salmon, blackberry with the beef, and apple with both the pork and the lamb. Swede, carrot, peas and spinach fill in behind, and chicory turns up on three of the labels for its prebiotic inulin.

Minerals come added and printed per kilo, with zinc at 50.1mg and iron at 20mg among the entries. Selenium is in the selenised yeast form and not a plain salt. At 0.016%, the separate yeast product earns its place through prebiotic MOS and beta glucans.

Across the range protein converts to between 37.5% and 43.3% of dry matter and fat to between 25.0% and 39.3%. That is a wide spread of richness for a set of recipes that read so alike on paper. Energy runs from 120 to 163 kcal per 100g. On the Fish and the Pork that energy figure is an estimate, worth knowing when you first measure a portion.

Turkey at 70% with venison at 10% and blueberry at 4%, which makes this a gentle introduction to venison rather than a venison recipe proper. Energy is mid range at 155 kcal per 100g, and on our scoring this is one of the strongest recipes here.

The Rabbit and Turkey and the Turkey with Venison are £4.89 a kilo, and the other nine recipes are £6.99. Every recipe comes in a 1kg bag.

Feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition takes about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75), which puts this range between £2.65 and £4.41 a day. Portions run from 515 grams on the densest recipes to 700 grams on the Rabbit and Turkey, the lightest of the eleven.