Royal Canin Dermacomfort Care Loaf review

This loaf comes out in our Average band, with protein and processing and transparency each reading Average and nutritional balance Outstanding, and the cause of the placing is visible in six entries of ingredients. A scoring system reads what a label declares, and a label written wholly in category terms declares next to nothing about the recipe behind it. Wet is one of the stronger categories we score, and the typical adult recipe lands in our Excellent band, which puts a good deal of distance between it and this loaf.

That distance is about disclosure, not about safety. It says the recipe is private, and a private recipe cannot be judged on its merits, however well it may be working in your kitchen.

Ingredients, as declared: meat and animal derivatives, derivatives of vegetable origin, cereals, minerals, oils and fats, various sugars.

The recipe is six category terms long. Meat and animal derivatives is the broadest description in the pet food rulebook, covering the fleshy parts and processing products of any warm blooded land animal, and derivatives of vegetable origin is nearly as wide. Neither is a hygiene concern in itself. Both simply keep the formula private and leave the maker free to alter it batch by batch while the pack stays the same.

Ordinary is the right word for the analysis, and it is a compliment. Protein converts to 39.1% of dry matter, fat to 30.0% and the carbohydrate estimate to 16.4%, within touching distance of the 15.8% typical of an adult wet food. Fat is the figure that stands out, and it at least sits sensibly with a recipe sold for coat condition, since dietary fat is where a shiny coat starts.

Minerals are listed ahead of oils and fats here, which is a small clue that the added mineral content outweighs the added oil. It is one of the very few things the ingredient order will tell you on a label written this way.

The added panel is dosed throughout: vitamin D3 at 200 IU, iron at 10mg, copper at 2.1mg, manganese at 3.1mg, zinc at 30mg and iodine at 0.3mg per kilo. Zinc is the largest trace element figure of the set, which is worth noting on a skin and coat recipe, since zinc is one of the minerals that condition depends on. Clinoptilolite at 2.2 g per kilo firms up the loaf.

Plenty of dogs have come through an itchy season on a Royal Canin diet, and the research behind the brand is not a marketing invention. Buy this one for what the maker says it does, knowing that the label asks you to take that on faith and does not show you the working.

£13.06 a kilo, in 85 g servings sold in packs of 12.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 850 grams a day at roughly £11.10, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). This loaf is portioned for much smaller dogs, so a real daily amount here is a fraction of that figure.