Nutriment Complete Senior review

This recipe earns our Excellent band. Adult raw is the hardest field we score to stand out in, and its middle food already reaches our Outstanding band. Finishing a shelf below is no criticism of a bowl of named meat, working offal and vegetables. Protein and processing reads Outstanding. Transparency reads Good, and that tracks what the label actually does: an undosed joint ingredient and a fair amount left unprinted.

Ingredients, as declared: 80% Fresh Meat, Offal and Bone / 20% Vegetables and Superfoods / 0% Grain or filler, 60% Chicken with Bone, 10% Beef Green Tripe, 5% Beef Heart, 3% Beef Liver, 2% Beef Kidney, 20% Veg & Superfoods (Carrot, Butternut Squash, Broccoli, Kale, Sesame Seeds, Chia Seeds, Sunflower Seeds, Salmon Oil, Wheatgerm Oil, Chicory Powder, Blueberry Powder, Spirulina, Glucosamine).

The 80 to 20 split is the difference between this and Nutriment's adult recipes, and it is doing deliberate work. More vegetables means more fibre and less energy per mouthful, which is usually what an older dog with a slower day needs. It also means a bowl that looks fuller for the same calories, no bad thing for a dog that still expects dinner to be an event.

Chicken with bone at 60% leads. Chicken is the easiest meat to keep an older dog on: highly digestible, dependably palatable and gentle on a gut that may have become fussier with age. The bone in the grind is what carries the calcium, since no mineral panel is printed anywhere on the pack.

The offal behind it is small but real. Beef green tripe at 10% arrives uncleaned and unbleached, which is why raw feeders rate it for digestion as well as for appetite. Beef heart at 5% is muscle meat in all but name, and liver at 3% with kidney at 2% carries the trace minerals and B vitamins that vegetables cannot supply.

Glucosamine sits at the end of the vegetable and superfood list. It occurs naturally in bone and cartilage anyway, and it is the most widely used joint supplement in both human and canine nutrition, although honest reading of the trials shows mixed results. Nutriment prints no dose for it here, so take it as a welcome extra on a recipe you already like rather than the reason to choose this one.

The rest of that fifth is the standard Nutriment blend. Broccoli and kale sit with butternut squash and carrot; the seeds are chia, sesame and sunflower; then come chicory powder, blueberry powder, spirulina, salmon oil and wheatgerm oil. Chicory root brings inulin, which behaves as a soluble fibre and feeds the gut's good bacteria. Salmon oil supplies the omega 3 fats an older dog's joints and coat draw on, and it also means this recipe is not fish free. Wheatgerm oil is pressed from wheat, worth registering next to the no-grain claim on the front.

The analysis is the lightest thing about it. Protein converts to 38.5% of dry matter and fat to 36.9%, both modest for a raw food. The carbohydrate estimate reaches 10.0% of dry matter against a 5.0% median across raw generally. That is the vegetable share showing itself. Energy comes out at 145 kcal per 100g on our estimate from the declared analysis, under the 155 kcal typical for raw, so portions run a little larger.

£6.58 a kilo, sold in a 500g pack.

For a 15kg dog in moderate condition, needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), that works out at roughly 578g a day, or £3.80.