Nutriment Complete Adult: Venison & Chicken review

Nine finish in our Excellent band and the salmon and turkey nudges into Outstanding, the ten of them tightly bunched. The company it keeps is what makes that a good result and not a modest one. No field we score is tougher than adult raw, and the food in the middle of it is already an Outstanding-band food. A range sitting level with that mark or a shelf under it is a range of genuinely good bowls. Protein and processing and nutritional balance read Outstanding on every recipe, with transparency reading Good right across the ten.

Ingredients, as declared: 85% Fresh Meat, Offal and Bone / 15% Vegetables and Superfoods / 0% Grain or filler, 40% Chicken with Bone, 35% Venison, 5% Beef Heart, 3% Beef Liver, 2% Beef Kidney, 15% Veg & Superfoods (Carrot, Butternut Squash, Broccoli, Kale, Sesame Seeds, Chia Seeds, Sunflower Seeds, Salmon Oil, Wheatgerm Oil, Chicory Powder, Blueberry Powder, Spirulina), Bone content: 8-10%

The blueprint is the point of this range. Eight recipes give 85% of the pack to fresh meat, offal and bone and 15% to vegetables and superfoods; the two rabbit labels shift that to 80% and 20%. Because the split is printed, you can see at a glance what you are buying, and it stays the same whichever animal you pick.

The offal here is a proper working set. Beef heart, liver and kidney appear in eight recipes, and beef green tripe joins them in several. Nothing on these labels carries more nutrition per gram than liver. Green tripe, meaning tripe that has not been cleaned or bleached, brings its own digestive enzymes and friendly bacteria, along with a smell dogs adore and owners tolerate.

The vegetable and superfood blend is identical across the range: carrot, butternut squash, broccoli and kale for the vegetables, then sesame, chia and sunflower seeds for fibre and fats. Salmon oil, wheatgerm oil, chicory powder, blueberry powder and spirulina finish it. Chicory is the interesting one, since the inulin in its root feeds the good bacteria in the gut and works as a soluble fibre at the same time. Salmon oil covers the long-chain omega 3 fats.

Two entries in that blend need saying out loud. Salmon oil means no recipe here is fish free, however land-based the animal on the front looks. Wheatgerm oil is pressed from wheat, so a label that says 0% grain still has a wheat-derived ingredient in it, which matters only if you are avoiding wheat rigorously rather than avoiding cereal bulk.

There is no printed vitamin and mineral panel anywhere in the range. Nutriment's approach is to let whole ingredients carry it: bone for calcium, organ meats for the B vitamins and trace minerals, and seeds and oils for the fats. That places a lot of weight on the offal share being as real as the label says it is, which on these recipes it appears to be. Bone content is stated as 8 to 10% on most labels, printed as 0% on the Boneless Beef, and built into the rabbit recipes as whole carcass.

The analyses are consistent in a way ranges this size rarely manage. Protein converts to between 44.2% and 46.1% of dry matter on every single recipe, while fat ranges much wider, from 21.4% on the leanest rabbit label to 44.2% on the Salmon & Turkey. Carbohydrate is estimated by difference and lands between 0.9% and 12.1% of dry matter, the higher readings belonging to the rabbit pair with their larger vegetable share. Energy figures across the range are our own estimates from the declared analysis, since Nutriment does not print kcal.

Chicken with bone at 40% and venison at 35%, the only deer meat on the Nutriment list and a genuinely uncommon protein to find in a complete raw recipe. Venison is lean and strongly flavoured, and pairing it with chicken keeps the bone content where the rest of the range sits. Protein converts to 46.0% of dry matter, right at the top of the range, at 178 kcal per 100g.

Per kilo, the Chicken is £4.49 and the Turkey £5.28. The Boneless Beef, the Chicken & Lamb, the Duck and the Salmon & Turkey are each £5.71, and the Lamb is £6.42. The Rabbit & Turkey and the Venison & Chicken are £7.98, and the Rabbit is £8.98.

A 500g pack is standard across the range, and all of them except the Rabbit, the Rabbit & Turkey and the Venison & Chicken also come in 1.4kg.

The sums below assume a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). A day's feeding costs £2.58 with the Chicken and £6.06 with the Rabbit. The ends of that range are set by two things at once, since the leaner recipes feed in larger portions as well as sitting higher per kilo.