Salubrious Healthy Dog Food Cold-Pressed Calm Down: Turkey review

We land this one in our Good band. The typical cold-pressed food reaches our Good band as well, so Calm Down sits level with the middle of its category, and the label shows how it gets there. Turkey leads at 28% and the roots behind it are generous, which takes carbohydrate to 52.3% of dry matter against 43.2% for cold-pressed food generally, while protein converts to a fairly modest 25.6%.

No single pillar pulls the result down. Transparency reads Outstanding, nutritional balance Average, and protein and processing sits on Good with value beside it. What you have is a food whose extras are unusually generous for the money and whose base is more starch led than most of the cold-pressed shelf, and that balance is what sets the level.

Ingredients, as declared: Turkey (28%), sweet potato (27%), potato (20%), salmon protein (5%), goose fat (5%), whole egg (5%), brewer's yeast, cane molasses, vitamins and minerals, liver gravy, prebiotic (inulin), alfalfa, salmon oil, sunflower oil. Herbal blend (0.25% chicory root, parsley, thyme, nettle leaf, rosemary, camomile leaf, sage, yucca extract, rosehip, dandelion leaf, turmeric, aniseed, red carnation, marjoram, yarrow, lady's mantle, hawthorne berries, burdock, milk thistle, garlic). Joint care blend, glucosamine (0.1%), collagen (0.08%), green lipped mussel (0.05%), chondroitin sulphate (0.05%), taurine, lysine.

Cold pressing comes before any single ingredient. The mixture goes into pellets under low temperature, with none of the hard cooking a kibble gets. The pellet then crumbles in water where kibble expands, and that is why owners of fast eaters and delicate stomachs are so often pointed towards the format.

Turkey at 28% leads the animal side. It is lean and digestible, one of the easier meats for a dog to get along with, and a regular choice in lighter recipes. Salmon protein at 5% and whole egg at 5% top up the amino acid side, with goose fat at 5% doing the fat work. That is three animals plus a fish on one label, so read it carefully if your reason for choosing turkey was to avoid something else.

The base is sweet potato at 27% and potato at 20%, which is why carbohydrate lands at 52.3% of dry matter. Alfalfa adds a little plant fibre and inulin is listed openly as the prebiotic. No grain appears anywhere on the list, which is the trade the recipe makes in return for a fairly large root fraction.

The herbal blend is where this recipe puts its personality. Twenty entries share 0.25% of the food between them. Camomile leaf and lady's mantle are in there, so are milk thistle and burdock, and so are hawthorn berries. At that inclusion the blend is seasoning rather than dosing, and the printed percentage is refreshingly straight about the scale of it. Garlic sits in the same blend, in the very small measured amounts that have been used in herbal dog food recipes for decades.

The finishing touches are more substantial than the herbs. Glucosamine at 0.1% and collagen at 0.08% are both printed. Green lipped mussel and chondroitin sulphate follow at 0.05% each. Taurine and lysine close the label as named amino acids, with no anonymous premix. Brewer's yeast earlier in the list is a natural source of B vitamins, and the nutritional panel prints vitamin A, vitamin D3 and vitamin E as declared additives.

£5.83 a kilo. It is sold as a 12 kg bag, a 3 kg bag and a sample bag of roughly 250 g.

A 15 kg adult dog in moderate condition needs around 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). At this food's estimated energy content of 332 kcal per 100g that comes to roughly 253 g a day, or £1.48. The maker's own chart for a 15 kg dog is 269 g.