Raw Pet Foods Complete Sticks: Beef review

We have not put a score against this range. The reason is a gap in what gets published, and nothing about the food itself. Three of the seven sticks, the Just Chicken, the Meatfeast and the Puppy, list no ingredients at all, and a recipe whose composition is not declared cannot honestly be weighed up beside recipes that are. The four sticks that do print their composition are detailed and percentaged, right down to the offal, which suggests an oversight on the website and not any reluctance to say. Ask Raw Pet Foods for the three missing lists and this becomes a straightforward range to assess.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 30%, Beef Flank 30%, Bones 10%, Carrots 8%, Heart 7%, Ox liver 6%, Butternut 3%, Green leaf 3%, Ox Kidney, Kelp, flaxseed oil 1%

Where a composition is printed it follows the pattern the brand uses across its frozen foods. A named meat sits well in front. Ox heart leads the organ share, and ox liver and ox kidney follow it. Carrots, butternut and green leaf make the plant fraction, and kelp with flaxseed oil at 1% comes at the end. No cereal, potato or pulse appears on any of them, and carbohydrate estimates at or near zero.

The organ meats are doing real work here. Liver at 2 to 6%, with kidney behind it, supplies copper and vitamin A and the B vitamins in the concentrated form that only offal provides. That is why these recipes can stand without a synthetic premix. Heart, at 4 to 7%, is a working muscle, so on the analysis it behaves like meat and not like an organ.

Kelp and flaxseed oil are the whole supplement story on the adult sticks. The seaweed supplies iodine and trace minerals, and the seed supplies plant omega 3 fats. The Puppy stick is the exception, its label naming a Vermix premix at 1%, though without the composition that would sit around it there is little more to be said than that it is there.

Two of the undeclared sticks at least publish an analysis. The Meatfeast declares protein at 17.8% and fat at 18.6% as fed, converting to 43.2% and 45.1% of dry matter, a properly rich and meat-shaped reading. The Just Chicken declares 14.9% protein and 17.8% fat with no fibre figure, so its table stays as fed. Both look like the rest of the line on paper; they simply have no list standing behind them.

Tripe earns a stick of its own and repays the attention. Green tripe goes in unbleached and unwashed, and it carries the enzymes and bacteria of a working stomach. Dogs love it with a consistency few ingredients match. In the Chicken & Tripe it takes 17% of the recipe, a proper share and not a gesture towards the name.

Chicken at 30% shares top billing with beef flank at 30%, and this is the only stick to itemise bone, at 10%, with ox liver at 6% and heart at 7% behind them. Protein converts to 40.7% of dry matter, and at an estimated 138 kcal per 100g it is the lightest stick here. By weight, a dog gets through more of this one than of any other.

Sticks weigh 1kg each and are sold individually or twelve to a box.

Per kilo, the Chicken is £4.25, the Chicken & Tripe, Just Chicken, Puppy and Turkey are £4.55 each, the Meatfeast is £4.65 and the Beef is £5.55.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, the standard maintenance sum (110 × bodyweight^0.75) gives about 840 kcal a day. A day's feeding runs from £1.74 on the Just Chicken and the Meatfeast up to £3.38 on the Beef. The Beef feeds in the largest portions because it is the lightest stick of them all.