Pala Beef & Salmon review

Our reading puts this recipe in our Outstanding band, with protein and processing, nutritional balance and value all Outstanding underneath it and transparency Excellent. Air dried food that names its animals and gives them percentages tends to read well for us. This label goes further: everything else is vegetables, berries, kelp and a little turmeric, with no synthetic supplement panel behind them. Air dried is a small shelf, too small for us to publish a typical you could measure this against. The band is the recipe's own reading, not a placing in a queue.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef (53%), salmon (30%), carrots, beets, celery, broccoli, kelp, crushed eggshells, turmeric, blueberries, cranberries, parsley, salmon oil, wheat grass, black pepper. No additives, synthetic supplements, flavors or preservatives.

Air drying sits between a cooked kibble and a raw block. The water is drawn out gently instead of being driven off in an extruder, which keeps the texture meaty and leaves the food stable at 12.0% moisture. That is why the analysis reads as it does, 44.8% protein and 32.6% fat as fed, converting to 50.9% and 37.0% of dry matter.

Beef at 53% and salmon at 30% makes for a genuinely even partnership, and the two animals bring different things. Beef is the dense, digestible red meat most dogs take to on sight, while salmon carries the long chain omega 3 fats a land animal simply cannot supply. Salmon oil further down the list tops that side up again.

The plant fraction is deliberately light. Carrots, beets, celery and broccoli lead it, with blueberries and cranberries for fruit. Kelp brings iodine and trace minerals, and parsley, turmeric and black pepper close the list out. The carbohydrate estimate comes to 5.0% of dry matter, so none of it is doing any bulking.

A pair of entries repay a closer look. Crushed eggshells are the calcium source, standing in for the mineral premix a conventionally supplemented recipe would carry, although that natural route is also why no calcium figure is printed. Wheat grass is the young leaf, not the grain, so none of the gluten that upsets a wheat sensitive dog is in there. Ingredient scanners flag the word anyway, and it helps to know why the entry sits on the list.

At 490 kcal per 100g this is concentrated food. The whole point of the format is that a dog eats a fraction of what a bag of kibble would ask for. It also means the scoop you have been using is now the wrong tool. Weigh it out, keep the water bowl full, and expect what comes out the other end to shrink accordingly.

£42.95 a kilo, in 100g, 400g and 1kg packs.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 172 grams a day, working from roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That lands at £7.37 a day.