Rocco Menu: Beef With Vegetables & Rice review

All three recipes come from the same construction, and it shows in the reading: the three of them finish inside a single band. Beef, Poultry, Vegetables and Rice sits in our Excellent band, reading Excellent for protein and processing, Outstanding for nutritional balance and Excellent for both transparency and value. Beef, Lamb, Vegetables and Rice joins it there, with Excellent for protein and processing and for value, and Outstanding for both nutritional balance and transparency. Beef With Vegetables and Rice holds the same band, reading Excellent on protein and processing and Outstanding on both nutritional balance and transparency. The typical adult wet food belongs in our Excellent band too, so the whole range is sitting level with the middle of the shelf. Much of what separates the three is how fully each label declares itself, including whether the maker prints an energy figure at all.

Ingredients, as declared: 60% Beef (Heart, Meat, Liver, Lung, Tripe) 27.8% Stock, 4% Carrots, 4% Rice, 3% Peas, 1% Minerals, 0.2 % Linseed Oil.

Every recipe in the range opens with 60% animal content, and Rocco names the parts instead of resorting to a category term. Heart, meat, liver, lung and tripe appear on the beef and lamb labels, with gizzards and neck joining on the poultry. Few dog food ingredients carry as much nutrition as liver. Tripe is easily digested and enormously popular with dogs, and heart is dense working muscle. This is a genuinely old fashioned way of feeding a dog.

Stock follows at 27.8%, a printed percentage where many labels simply say water. That small piece of honesty deserves credit. No species is named for it, and on an otherwise tidy list that is the one loose thread.

Every part of the small plant side carries a figure: 4% carrots, 4% rice, 3% peas. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 14.4% of dry matter in the beef and lamb tin, 14.0% in the beef and 23.6% in the beef and poultry tray, against 15.8% typical for adult wet food. Two of the three sit below that mark, and none of them leans on starch the way a cereal heavy recipe would.

Linseed oil closes each list at 0.2%, which is a modest but genuine source of omega 3, and 1% minerals covers the macro side. The added vitamins and trace elements are short and dosed: vitamin D3 at 200 IU, vitamin E at 30mg, zinc at 15mg, manganese at 3mg and iodine at 0.75mg, with biotin named as well.

One word on the poultry recipe. The word poultry covers a category and not a single bird, so it can mean any of chicken, turkey, duck and goose. The bird can change between production batches, and the label will not say so. That is common practice and it is not a quality problem, but a dog that reacts to one particular bird cannot be kept safe on a label written that way.

Beef fills the entire 60% animal share on its own, which makes this the simplest label in the range. If your dog is happiest on red meat, this is the tin. Fat runs highest here, 34.0% of dry matter, while the estimated carbohydrate is the lowest in the range at 14.0%.

Beef, Lamb, Vegetables and Rice and Beef With Vegetables and Rice are both £2.86 a kilo, in 400g and 800g tins. Beef, Poultry, Vegetables and Rice is £3.02 a kilo, in 300g trays.

Set a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition at about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The beef and lamb tin then comes to £2.05 a day, the beef and poultry tray to £2.21 and the beef tin to £1.99. In grams that is roughly 718, 730 and 695 respectively. Rocco's guide for the tray puts a 20kg dog on 915 grams a day.