Pala Chicken review

This label lands in our Outstanding band, with protein and processing, nutritional balance and value all reading Outstanding beneath it and transparency Excellent. What gets it there is a bird given a real figure rather than a vague nod, with an egg behind it for protein quality. The supporting list stays small and purposeful right down to the citrus bioflavonoids. Air dried food has no typical for us to hold this against, because the format is too small a shelf to build a reliable one from. Take the band as a reading of the recipe on its own terms.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (76%), egg (6%), carrots, cabbage, beets, flaxseed oil, Icelandic kelp, wheatgrass, crabshell, oregano, cranberries, blueberries, sea buckthorn, natural tocopherols with rosemary extract, turmeric, sea salt, thyme, bamboo fibre, citrus bioflavonoids, black pepper. No synthetic additives, supplements, flavours or preservatives.

Chicken at 76% is the whole argument for this recipe, and egg at 6% is a shrewd partner, since egg protein is the benchmark other proteins tend to get measured against. Between them they take the animal content past four fifths of the pack before a single vegetable gets a look in.

Air drying is what makes those percentages mean something in the bowl. The water leaves gently, with no extrusion heat blasting it out, and the food settles at 10.0% moisture. That is why protein reads 37.0% and fat 39.3% as fed. Converted across, that becomes 41.1% and 43.7% of dry matter, a properly rich reading for a dog with work to do.

The vegetables and fruit are chosen for what they bring rather than to fill the bag out: carrots, cabbage and beets, with cranberries, blueberries and sea buckthorn behind them. The carbohydrate estimate lands at 5.2% of dry matter, which tells you how little of this food is anything other than animal and plant matter doing a specific job.

The interesting part is at the tail of the list. Crabshell brings glucosamine in its natural form, useful to a joint that has covered some mileage, and it is also the entry a shellfish sensitive household needs to spot. Bamboo fibre is a gentle insoluble fibre that helps stool quality, Icelandic kelp brings iodine, and the oregano, thyme and citrus bioflavonoids are antioxidant work. Sea salt is there as well, as it is on most air dried foods, and a household watching a dog's sodium will want to note it.

With nothing synthetic in the recipe, the vitamin E family does the preserving here, natural tocopherols alongside rosemary extract, in place of a chemical preservative. Then there is the density. At 521 kcal per 100g a dog eats a small measure of this, so the water bowl matters more than it does on a wet or fresh food. A switch across is best made slowly.

£42.95 a kilo. Packs run 100g, 400g and 1kg.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition takes around 161 grams a day, on an estimate of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance figure). That is £6.93 a day.