Red Mills Tracker review

Our Poor band holds this one, some way under the Good band the typical adult dry food occupies. The reason is almost entirely what the label leaves unsaid. Category terms such as cereals and meat and animal derivatives can cover excellent material or very ordinary material. From the outside nobody can tell which, so we can only read what is declared. The analysis adds to it, with protein at 22.2% of dry matter and fat at 8.9% both on the light side and carbohydrate at 58.5% above what a typical bag carries. Two things the label does properly are worth keeping in view. It doses its vitamins and minerals in print, and it declares its moisture where many labels leave that to be assumed.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives, Oils and Fats, Fish and Fish Derivatives, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Vegetable Protein Extracts, Minerals, Chicory Extract, Yeast Extract.

Nearly every entry here names a legal category, not an ingredient. Cereals could be rice, wheat, maize or any mixture of them. Meat and animal derivatives covers everything from prime muscle meat to the parts of a carcass nobody puts on a label, and derivatives of vegetable origin is broader still. Broad terms are not proof of poor material, and plenty of decent foods use them to protect a recipe, but they do leave you taking the bag on trust.

Vegetable protein extracts is the entry most worth understanding. It is plant protein, in there to lift the protein figure. A dog gets less out of it than out of the same weight of meat protein, which is part of why the declared 20.0% reads gentler in practice than the number first suggests.

Fat is declared at 8.0%, low for a dry food, and it looks deliberate. This is a recipe pitched at steady condition, not at racing weight. Fibre converts to 2.6% of dry matter. Behind it the chicory extract supplies inulin, which the gut's own bacteria feed on.

Nothing on this label is stronger than the additive panel. Vitamin D3 at 2000 IU and vitamin E at 250 IU are printed with amounts. So are zinc at 140 mg, iron at 134 mg, manganese at 65 mg, copper at 28 mg, iodine at 2.45 mg and selenium at 0.33 mg per kilo. Oxides and sulphates are the forms, with no chelates among them, and a dog's gut generally works a little harder on those. The selenium is sodium selenite.

The yeast extract closing the list is a palatant, there to make a plain recipe taste worth finishing. On a food this understated that is honest work, and dogs tend to appreciate it.

£1.11 a kilo. Bags are 15kg, singly or six to a pack.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition takes around 260 grams a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). At that rate the daily figure comes to roughly £0.29.