Pedigree Adult Dry: With Beef & Vegetables review

Our bands put the typical adult dry food at Good and both of these two levels under it, at Poor. The arithmetic behind that is not mysterious. Protein converts to 21.7% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate to 58.2%. Nearly every line on the ingredients list names a legal category, and that is where the transparency reading loses its footing. Plenty of dogs have eaten it contentedly for years, and there is nothing unsafe or unpalatable about it. It does mean a careful label reader is given very little to hold on to.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals*, Meat and Animal Derivatives (including Beef 4%), Oils and Fats, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin (including Dried Beet Pulp* 3%), Minerals, Vegetables* (including Dried Peas and Carrots mix 0.7%, equivalent to Peas and Carrots mix 4%), Yeast (including Brewer's Yeast 0.4%), *Natural ingredients

Cereals lead both recipes, and that single word is doing a great deal of work. It covers wheat, maize, rice, barley and everything in between, which lets the mix follow whatever the market offers. Some perfectly good foods use umbrella terms for reasons of their own, but the practical effect is the same: the grain in this bag need not be the grain in the next one.

Meat and animal derivatives follow, with 4% named as beef on one pack and as poultry on the other. The category is drawn broadly in law, taking in the fleshy parts and the processing products of warm-blooded land animals. Quality can sit anywhere along a wide range and the pack would read the same either way. What can be measured is the result: protein at 21.7% of dry matter and fat at 9.8%, modest figures for a dry food.

The rest of the list follows the same pattern. Oils and fats goes unnamed, and derivatives of vegetable origin is unnamed apart from dried beet pulp at 3%. The vegetables amount to a dried peas and carrots mix at 0.7%, which the label helpfully notes is the equivalent of 4% before the water was taken out. Beet pulp is a genuinely useful fibre for stool quality, and brewer's yeast at 0.4% is a real source of B vitamins.

The added nutrition is printed properly. Nowhere else on the pack tells you as much. Vitamin B1 at 6.2 mg, B2 at 10.7 mg, vitamin D3 at 1687 IU, vitamin E at 100 mg and biotin at 0.15 mg per kilo are all there. Alongside them sit zinc at 51 mg, manganese at 18 mg, copper at 6.6 mg and iodine at 1.7 mg, with selenium beneath them. Biotin and zinc are the two most closely tied to coat condition, and both are here at sensible doses.

Antioxidants and preservatives are declared as categories with no names attached, which is permitted and extremely common in this part of the market. It is simply the last place on the pack where you are asked to take something on trust.

This is the bag that pins its named 4% to an actual species. Beef is a red meat most dogs digest without fuss, and naming it rather than a family of animals is the one point of extra clarity across the two recipes. The rest of the list, from the beet pulp at 3% down to the brewer's yeast at 0.4%, matches its stablemate.

The beef is sold as a 12kg bag; the chicken comes in 1.4kg, 3kg and 12kg. We held no checked price for either when this was written, so no per-kilo or per-day figure is given below.

For portioning, a 15kg adult in moderate condition needs roughly 238 grams a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 kcal × bodyweight^0.75, about 840 kcal). The label's own table asks 150 to 165 grams for a 10kg dog and 255 to 280 grams for a 20kg one, so the two guides bracket each other neatly.