Rocco Diet Care Hepatic: Chicken with Oat Flakes & Cottage Cheese review

The product name carries the recipe, chicken with oat flakes and cottage cheese. Rocco publishes no itemised list underneath that name, so the order of the ingredients and their proportions are not on view, and neither is anything the name leaves out.

That gap matters more on a therapeutic diet than it would elsewhere. The name puts a dairy ingredient in the bowl through the cottage cheese and a cereal in through the oats, but nothing beyond those can be confirmed or ruled out from what is printed. Ask the practice or Rocco for the full declaration before you move him onto it, especially if he is being kept away from a particular protein.

The nutritional additives are dosed in print. Vitamin D3 comes in at 200 IU and vitamin E at 20mg, with biotin at 300mcg. The trace minerals follow, zinc at 25mg, manganese at 1.4mg, copper at 1.0mg and iodine at 0.75mg. Vitamin A appears nowhere in that panel. Copper is the entry to take to your vet, since a declared figure is something a liver plan can actually be checked against.

On the analysis, protein is declared at 7.0% and fat at 5.5%, which against the declared 78.0% moisture works out at 31.8% and 25.0% of dry matter. Crude fibre is slight at 0.3%, ash converts to 9.5% and the carbohydrate estimate reaches 32.3%, with energy at 102 kcal per 100g. Protein held at that level, with starch doing more of the work, is how a liver diet is normally put together. It is not a gap in the recipe. Read the figures as the design, and let the vet who prescribed it say whether that shape suits your dog.

It is sold as 400g units in packs of 6 and 24, and as 300g pouches in packs of 6, 12 and 24, at £4.11 a kilo. On an energy estimate for a 15kg dog that comes to roughly 824g a day, which puts the daily cost at about £3.38.