Ouzil Scotch Egg review

This one lands in our Outstanding band, with protein and processing and nutritional balance both reading Outstanding, transparency Excellent and value Outstanding. That is a strong showing on a shelf where the standard is already high, since fresh food as a whole occupies that same top band. The reading follows the label almost exactly: everything in the pack is food you could name out loud, and the animal content is essentially the whole of it. The maker also prints its natural supplement ingredient by ingredient instead of hiding behind the word natural.

Ingredients, as declared: 100% free range egg and sausage meat (from home reared pork), all natural supplement and dried parsley.

The construction is the appeal. A free range egg sits at the centre, sausage meat made from the maker's home reared pork goes around it, and the only other entries are the natural supplement and a little dried parsley. Egg is close to the benchmark other proteins get measured against. Pork is highly palatable, and it remains unusual enough on a dog's plate that plenty of dogs have never once met it.

The supplement is printed out in full, which not every maker bothers to do. Sunflower seeds at 0.75g and pumpkin seeds at 0.5g per kilo lead it. Behind them come dried blackberry and nettle at 0.4g each, seaweed at 0.25g, sage and thyme at 0.2g, and reishi and organic spirulina at 0.15g. Ground egg shell is declared separately at 0.5g per 100g and is the calcium in the recipe, while the seaweed is doing the iodine work that a meat-only bowl would otherwise miss.

The analysis is unusually rich for a fresh food, protein coming out at 62.0% of dry matter and fat at 47.3%, with fibre barely registering and the energy estimate landing at 186 kcal per 100g. Because moisture is left off the label, that column is worked from an assumed 70%. Those figures add up to more than a whole food can hold, which is a fair sign the egg is drier than the assumption allows for. Read them as the shape of the food, and not to the decimal point.

Fresh means fridge, and this arrives as one scotch egg to a pack at around 275g. This is a meal you portion against the feeding guide. That guide runs from 138g at the small end up to 825g for the biggest dogs on the table. For most households it works as a whole meal for a small dog and part of one for a larger dog.

£19.67 a kilo. Each pack holds a single scotch egg, and the maker puts the size of one egg at approximately 275g.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would get through about 452 grams a day, taking roughly 840 kcal a day from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That works out at £8.89 a day.