Pro Plan Medium & Large Adult 7+ Sensitive Skin review

Our scale settles this in the Average band, a step under the everyday run of adult dry food. It gets there by doing the ordinary things adequately rather than by standing out anywhere. Salmon at 17% is a genuine named share, the mineral panel is dosed in print, and carbohydrate converts to 43.5% of dry matter, a shade under the 46.2% typical for adult dry food. Holding it back are the unnamed animal fats, the soya and the sheer amount of corn. One note on the arithmetic: the label leaves moisture out, so the dry matter conversions here assume the 8% a kibble usually holds.

Ingredients, as declared: High quality salmon* (including head, bone, meat) (17%), Rice* (16%), Corn protein meal*, Dried salmon protein*, Corn starch, Corn*, Soya meal*, Animal fats, Minerals, Dried beet pulp*, Dried vegetable fiber, Dried egg*, Soyabean oil, Digest, Fish oil

Salmon at 17% opens the label, declared as head, bone and meat. As descriptions of a fish meal go, that is a fair one. Because it is fresh fish, the oven takes most of its weight away, and the dried salmon protein further down the list picks up the slack. Protein finishes at 28.0% as fed, or 30.4% of dry matter.

The largest plant entry is rice at 16%, and corn follows it three separate times, as corn protein meal, as corn starch and as plain corn. Corn protein meal concentrates plant protein, and it is part of the reason the protein figure reads as well as it does. Not all of that protein came from the fish.

For a food named after sensitive skin, the fats matter more than anything else on the list, and here they come from three places. Soyabean oil and dried egg sit in the middle of the label, and fish oil closes it as the marine omega 3 source. The trace minerals behind them are dosed one at a time. Zinc is at 120 mg per kilo, iron at 130 mg, manganese at 48 mg and copper at 13 mg, with vitamin E at 650 IU and vitamin C at 165 mg.

Two entries stay deliberately vague. Animal fats name no creature, and digest, the palatant sprayed on to make kibble worth eating, names none either. Very few dogs have any trouble with either, but between them they stop this recipe serving as a diagnostic diet. Soya meal belongs in the same conversation: an economical protein that most dogs live with happily and a smaller number react to.

£3.88 a kilo, sold in 3kg and 14kg bags.

A 15kg adult in moderate condition would eat around 223 grams a day on our usual maintenance estimate of about 840 kcal (110 × bodyweight^0.75), which comes to £0.86 a day. For a 10kg dog under an hour of exercise the pack's table asks 150 grams. Let the waistline be the tie breaker between the two.