Pets at Home Complete Nutrition Large Breed Dry review

Poor is a strong word for a food that will do nobody any harm, so here is what the band actually measures. Four of the six entries on this ingredients list are categories rather than ingredients, and a system that reads labels can only reward what a label actually declares. The typical adult dry food occupies our Good band, and that opacity accounts for most of the gap. A carbohydrate share above the norm and a respectable but not generous protein figure make up the rest.

None of it says a healthy adult dog will do badly here. It says the bag is not telling you very much, and that is a different complaint.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives (25% including 4% Chicken), Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Oils and Fats, Vegetables (1.3% Dried Peas, equivalent to 4% Peas), Minerals.

Cereals takes first position, which under labelling rules means grain outweighs everything else in the bag. Which grain is left open, and that openness is deliberate, since it lets the recipe follow whatever the mill has in stock that month. The same latitude applies to derivatives of vegetable origin further down the list.

The meat entry is declared at 25%, and 4% of it carries the chicken name. Everything else in that quarter is meat and animal derivatives, the legal catch-all for parts of warm-blooded land animals that do not sell as cuts. It converts to 25.0% protein on a dry matter basis, a normal working figure for a kibble of this kind.

Peas appear as 1.3% dried, printed alongside their pre-drying equivalent of 4%. It is a small entry and the label is honest about being one, which is more than the terms above it manage.

The supplement panel is fully dosed, with nothing left as a hint. Vitamin D3 at 1,500IU and vitamin E at 70mg sit alongside a declared vitamin A, methionine is added at 1,500mg, and the trace minerals run from zinc at 100mg down to selenium at 0.10mg. The forms chosen are the plain ones, zinc oxide and sodium selenite rather than the chelates and organic selenium found on more elaborate recipes, and those plainer forms are generally taken up less efficiently. Antioxidants are named by function only.

Ash at 8.0% and calcium at 2.5% of dry matter both sit towards the top of the usual range for an adult kibble. That is what you tend to see when the meat used carries a fair amount of bone. For a grown dog in normal health that is unremarkable, and since the bag is labelled adult only, the question of a growing skeleton does not arise here.

£1.03 a kilo from the 15kg sack and £1.25 a kilo from the 6kg, with the same food in each.

Feeding a 15kg adult in moderate condition works out at roughly 256 grams a day, on a target of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance guide). That is around £0.26 a day. A genuinely large dog eats proportionally more, so scale from your own dog's weight and not from that figure.