Pala Lamb & Herring review

This one reads in our Good band for us, with nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding and protein and processing sitting on Good alongside value. Two named animals with figures against them, an egg for protein quality and a plant list that stays out of the way is exactly the sort of label our scoring rewards. The refusal to add a synthetic supplement panel is backed by a genuinely mineral-rich set of ingredients. We hold no typical figure for air dried food, so there is no shelf average sitting behind this reading, only the recipe itself.

Ingredients, as declared: Lamb (41%), Atlantic herring (31%), egg (6%), spinach, butternut squash, carrots, beets, Icelandic kelp, wheat grass, crushed eggshells, sea salt, turmeric, black pepper, citrus bioflavonoids, natural tocopherols with rosemary extract. No synthetic additives, supplements, flavors or preservatives. 100% natural. No additives, supplements, flavors or synthetic preservatives.

Lamb and herring is an old pairing and a sensible one. Lamb is the red meat here, easy on most dogs' digestion, and few of them have been over-exposed to it. Herring is a small oily fish, bringing omega 3 fats and a mineral profile no land animal can match. Egg at 6% rounds the protein out and adds the amino acid balance that makes the rest work harder.

Air drying leaves the food at 10.0% moisture, dry enough for the cupboard without the heat a kibble goes through on its way out of the extruder. The analysis follows from that: 43.2% protein and 33.4% fat as fed. Strip the water out and those become 48.0% and 37.1%, with the carbohydrate estimate at 7.2% of dry matter.

Spinach and butternut squash lead the plant side, with carrots and beets behind them, which is a greener list than most air dried recipes bother with. Icelandic kelp is the mineral and iodine entry, turmeric and black pepper the aromatics, and citrus bioflavonoids do antioxidant duty at the end.

Natural tocopherols and rosemary extract keep it fresh, the vitamin E route and not a chemical one. No vitamin or mineral premix stands behind the composition at all. Crushed eggshells carry the calcium instead. That is an honest way to build a recipe, though it does mean no calcium figure ends up printed on the pack.

This is dense food. At 499 kcal per 100g a portion is small and almost entirely animal, so move across gradually, weigh the first week properly and keep water available. Next to none of the moisture that a fresh or tinned food brings is in here.

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

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 168 grams a day, assuming roughly 840 kcal a day from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That works out at £7.23 a day.