Rosie's Farm Single Meat Dry: Adult Salmon with Rice review

All five settle in our Good band, level with the middle of the adult dry shelf. Read this as a solidly ordinary range and not a disappointing one. The label earns credit for naming its animal, printing the dried and fresh split and using a dried fruit and vegetable tail rather than a vague vegetable term. What keeps it mid table is the balance. Rice and peas take three of the top four places on every list, and protein converts to no more than 30.4% of dry matter even on the strongest recipe. The trace minerals go in as plain sulphates, which a dog absorbs less readily than the chelated forms.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon (28%,consisting of 23% dried salmon and 5% fresh salmon), brown rice (19%), white rice (19%), green peas (19%), chicken fat, salmon broth (3%), beet pulp [dried], apples [dried], minerals, linseed, chicory [dried] [as a natural source of FOS and inulin] (0.5%), carrots [dried], broccoli [dried], spinach [dried], tomatoes [dried], cranberries [dried], blueberries [dried], herbs [dried].

Every recipe opens with its animal and then breaks that share down, which is the detail most labels leave out. The lamb, for instance, is 29% in total, 24% of it dried lamb and 5% fresh. Dried meat keeps its weight through cooking while fresh meat gives most of its up as water. The protein therefore rides on the dried share, and here that is much the larger of the two.

Brown rice and white rice go in at matching percentages with green peas beside them. Rice is a gentle, digestible grain that suits a lot of dogs, and brown rice brings more fibre than white does. With three starch entries in the top four, though, a lot of the load sits on the plant side.

The fat entry is where the single meat idea either holds or slips. The lamb, adult turkey and senior recipes take their fat from the same animal as their meat, and the light recipe adds no fat at all. The salmon recipe uses chicken fat, which is the one place a second animal walks into the bowl.

The supporting cast is sensible. Dried beet pulp gives steady fibre, dried chicory at 0.5% supplies inulin and fructo-oligosaccharides to feed gut bacteria, and linseed brings plant omega 3. The dried tail of carrot, broccoli, spinach, tomato, cranberry and blueberry is a genuine set of whole foods, though this far down a list it amounts to a garnish.

The added minerals arrive as sulphates, a form a dog's gut generally works a little harder on than a chelate. The amounts are printed in full: zinc at 62.5 mg, iron at 50 mg, manganese at 15 mg, copper at 10 mg and iodine at 1.5 mg per kilo. No calcium figure appears on any of these labels, which matters less on adult recipes than it would on a food for growth, though it is still a number worth having.

Salmon at 28%, made up of 23% dried and 5% fresh, with salmon broth at 3% on top of it. The fat here comes from chicken and not from fish, so this is the one recipe not built on a single animal. It also carries the lowest ash of the five at 6.5% of dry matter and the most energy at 369 kcal per 100g.

£4.99 a kilo for the adult and light recipes and £4.08 a kilo for the senior. Bags come in 1kg and 12kg, with multipacks of five 1kg bags and two 12kg bags on the adult flavours.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats between 228 and 275 grams a day depending on the recipe, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That puts the daily figure between £1.00 and £1.37. The labels themselves ask anywhere from 180 to 325 grams for a dog that weight, and the waistline is the best guide to which end of that suits your dog.