Orlando Complete: Beef & Vegetables review

Our reading puts both flavours in our Poor band, two rungs under the Good band where the typical adult dry food settles. What the label leaves out accounts for nearly all of that distance, and nothing in it is harmful. The meat, the grain, the oils and most of the plant content are named by legal category instead of by ingredient, and protein finishes modestly at 23.1% of dry matter once the water is gone. Every vitamin and trace mineral it adds carries a printed dose, and fed to a healthy adult with no dietary flashpoints it still does the everyday work of a complete food.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, 23% Meat and Animal Derivatives (Including 4% Beef), Oils and Fats, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Vegetables (Including 1.25% Dried Peas), Minerals.

Cereals open the list, and the label never says which. That one word stretches from good rice and oats down to the plainest grain fractions, and it allows the recipe to follow whatever the mill has that month. There is nothing dangerous in that. You are trusting the maker here, not reading the food.

Meat and animal derivatives at 23% supply the protein. Of that, 4% is pinned to beef or to chicken, according to which bag you pick up. The category is drawn broadly in law, covering the fleshy parts and processing products of warm-blooded land animals. Quality inside it can sit anywhere, and the pack never has to change a word. What can be measured is the outcome: protein converts to 23.1% of dry matter and fat to 7.7%, which reads as a lean, unhurried kibble.

Oils and fats and derivatives of vegetable origin are the other two umbrella entries, and between them they carry the fat and much of the starch. Vegetables get their own mention, with dried peas named at 1.25%. That is a garnish, so read the vegetable billing as a small addition and not as a meaningful share of the bowl.

The added nutrition is where this label turns specific. Vitamin A at 14400 IU, vitamin D3 at 1680 IU and vitamin E at 48 mg per kilo open the panel. Zinc at 96 mg, iron at 96 mg, manganese at 38 mg and copper at 14 mg sit alongside them, with iodine at 1.44 mg and selenium at 0.19 mg beneath. The forms used are the plain oxide and sulphate ones, not chelates, and a dog's gut takes them up slightly less readily. Every one of them is dosed in print.

Neither carbohydrate nor energy is declared, so both are worked out from the rest of the panel: carbohydrate at 50.5% as fed, and energy at roughly 310 kcal per 100g. Hold on to that last figure when you measure, because a food this light on calories fills a scoop faster than it fills a dog.

Beef takes the named 4% inside the 23% meat block here. Beef is a red meat, easily digested by most dogs and one comparatively few have run into as a problem. That makes it the gentler introduction of the two bags for a dog whose history you do not know. Everything else on the list matches the chicken word for word.

Both flavours are sold as a 10kg bag. There was no checked price in front of us when this page was written, so no per-kilo or per-day figure appears here.

For portioning, a 15kg adult in moderate condition works out at about 271 grams a day, using the standard maintenance estimate of 110 kcal × bodyweight^0.75, roughly 840 kcal for a dog that size. Let the waistline rather than the scoop have the final word.