Pala Original review

Our band for this recipe is Outstanding, with protein and processing and nutritional balance both reading Outstanding underneath it, transparency Excellent and value Outstanding with it. Three named animals carry a percentage each, the plant list is kept to vegetables, berries and kelp, and no synthetic supplement panel appears anywhere. All of that reads well for us on every count the recipe itself controls. Because air dried food is such a small shelf, we publish no typical for the format, so this reading stands on the recipe alone rather than on any comparison with its neighbours.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (41%), salmon (12%), beef (32%), carrots, beets, celery, broccoli, kelp, turmeric, parsley, blueberries, cranberries, salmon oil, wheat grass, crushed eggshells, sea salt, black pepper. No additives, synthetic supplements, flavors or preservatives.

Three animals in one recipe amounts to a rotation of sorts inside a single bag. Chicken at 41% brings the digestible everyday protein, and beef at 32% adds the density and iron that a red meat carries. Salmon at 12% is there for the omega 3 fats that neither of the others can supply. Salmon oil further down the list keeps that side topped up.

Air drying is the reason those percentages survive into the bowl. There is no dough pushed through an extruder under heat here. The moisture is drawn out slowly until the food holds at 12.0%, and that leaves 43.7% protein and 31.3% fat as fed, or 49.7% and 35.6% once converted to dry matter.

Underneath the meat the list stays purposeful. Carrots, beets, celery and broccoli are the vegetables. Blueberries and cranberries are the fruit, kelp is there for iodine and trace minerals, and turmeric, parsley and black pepper come last. The carbohydrate estimate is 7.1% of dry matter, so nothing on that list is padding the bag out.

Two entries are worth explaining properly. Crushed eggshells supply the calcium in place of the mineral premix a conventional recipe would use, which is exactly why no calcium percentage appears on the pack. Wheat grass comes off the wheat plant as a leaf, never as a grain, so the gluten that a cereal-sensitive dog reacts to is not in there. The word itself will still catch an allergen filter's eye.

It is concentrated food at 482 kcal per 100g, and it feeds accordingly. Measures look small and stools get smaller, while water intake matters more than it does on anything wet. Move across gradually over a week or so and weigh portions properly until your dog's condition tells you where to settle.

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

As a guide, roughly 174 grams a day suits a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, based on about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That puts it at £7.49 a day.