Royal Canin Medium Dental Care review

Dental Care sits in our Average band, a step under the Good band where the typical adult dry food is found, and nine ingredients explain most of that. Maize flour is in front of the meat, and the meat is poultry with no bird named. Protein settles at 25.0% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate at 48.3% against 46.2% for the category. A food built around a single job always reads thin against a general nutrition scale, because its ingredients are chosen for something the scale does not measure. In this case that something is tartar, and on those terms the recipe is doing what it says.

Ingredients, as declared: maize flour, dehydrated poultry protein, rice, animal fats, hydrolysed animal proteins, beet pulp, vegetable fibres, minerals, cellulose powder.

The list runs to nine entries, which is unusually short and, in its way, informative. Maize flour takes the lead, dehydrated poultry protein comes second and rice third, so this is cereal first and meat second. Protein lands at 25.0% of dry matter and fat at 17.4%, which makes it a moderately rich food behind the plain reading.

The dental machinery is easy to miss because it sits among the additives rather than the ingredients. Pentasodium triphosphate at 3.5 g per kilo is a chelating agent: it ties up the calcium in saliva so that less of it can settle on the tooth as tartar. Beside it, cellulose powder and vegetable fibres give the kibble structure, so it stays whole under a tooth and does not shatter on first contact. That is the other half of how a dental kibble earns the name.

Cellulose powder is worth a straight word. The fibre is purified plant material that a dog barely digests, and it brings almost nothing nutritionally. That is exactly the point: it adds bulk and bite without adding calories. It is not a quality ingredient in the way a named meat is, and on a food designed around texture it is doing an honest job.

The animal side of the recipe is entirely unnamed. Chicken, turkey, duck or goose all fit under dehydrated poultry protein, and the animal fats name nothing at all. Hydrolysed animal proteins are broken down far enough that even a sensitive immune system tends to walk past them. For most dogs none of that registers. Strict exclusion diets need a fuller label than this one.

What the list does not contain is also worth noting. There is no wheat, no soya and nothing from fish anywhere on it, which quietly makes this one of the simpler labels on the shelf. The nutritional additives cover vitamin A at 15500 IU and vitamin D3 at 1000 IU. Zinc runs at 128 mg, manganese at 51 mg, iron at 39 mg, copper at 12 mg, iodine at 3.9 mg and selenium at 0.07 mg per kilo. Vitamin E and vitamin C carry no figures here, and neither does calcium, which on a recipe working with the minerals in saliva is the omission a curious reader will spot first.

£6.01 a kilo, sold in a single 10kg bag.

As a guide, a 15kg dog in moderate condition would get through about 226 grams a day, working from an assumed 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That puts the day rate at £1.36. The label's own table asks 219 grams for a 15kg dog and 321 grams for a 25kg one, close enough to the estimate that either makes a fair starting point.