Royal Canin Medium Dermacomfort review

Dermacomfort takes the Average band on our scale, one step under the Good band that the middle of the adult dry shelf holds. The arithmetic behind that is unusual for this brand. It is not the carbohydrate, which at 46.9% of dry matter is all but level with the 46.2% typical for the category. It is that the recipe declares almost no animal ingredient at all: the protein is largely plant, and the two animal entries name nothing. Against a general nutrition scale that reads as a thin label. Read as a skin diet, it is a deliberate design, and keeping named meats out of it is the entire point.

Ingredients, as declared: rice, vegetable protein isolate*, wheat, animal fats, maize gluten, husked oats, maize, minerals, hydrolysed animal proteins, soya oil, beet pulp, fish oil, flax seeds, fructo-oligo-saccharides, borage oil, marigold extract (source of lutein).

Rice leads, and rice is about the most benign cereal a kibble can be built on, easily digested and rarely the cause of anything. Second comes a vegetable protein isolate, a concentrated plant protein. With maize gluten, husked oats and maize behind them, they take the recipe's protein to 26.4% of dry matter without a named animal contributing much of it.

That absence is the design rather than an accident. Common animal proteins are the usual suspects when a dog's skin flares, so a recipe meant to calm skin often does its protein work with plants. This one goes further than most, with no meat named anywhere on it. The animal contributions are animal fats, hydrolysed animal proteins and fish oil, none of them a meat. The trade is straightforward. A dog gets less complete protein from plants than from meat. Building a food this way asks more of the formulation to make the amino acids add up.

The oils are where the real work is done. Borage oil supplies gamma-linolenic acid, the omega 6 usually chosen when skin is irritated. Fish oil brings EPA and DHA from the other direction, flax seeds add the plant form of omega 3, and marigold extract contributes lutein. Total fat sits at 18.7% of dry matter, on the rich side for an everyday adult food, and a good deal of that richness is doing coat work.

The trace mineral panel is generous: zinc at 150 mg, manganese at 67 mg, iron at 67 mg, copper at 13 mg, iodine at 5.5 mg and selenium at 0.17 mg per kilo. Vitamin A comes in at 29500 IU and vitamin D3 at 800 IU. Skin leans on zinc harder than on any other mineral, so lifting it on a recipe with this name is exactly the right instinct.

Two label habits are worth calling out plainly, because they cut both ways. The animal fats keep the food palatable and the hydrolysed animal proteins supply what plants cannot. Neither entry says which animal was involved. Hydrolysed protein in particular is broken into pieces small enough that most immune systems ignore them. That is useful on a skin food and unhelpful if you are trying to prove exactly what your dog reacts to. Calcium is not declared either, a gap on any label, though a modest one on a food written for adults.

£5.27 a kilo, sold in 3kg and 12kg bags.

As a guide, about 222 grams a day covers a 15kg dog in moderate condition, on an assumed requirement of 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That gives a day rate of £1.17. The bag's own table is leaner, asking 182 grams for a 15kg dog and 267 grams for a 25kg one, so begin where the label says and adjust by feel.