Salubrious Healthy Dog Food Cold-Pressed Grain and Gluten Free: Salmon review

All four recipes reach our Good band, the same band the typical cold-pressed food occupies. The four are close enough together that your dog's tastes should decide between them rather than the ranking.

What holds the family where it is comes down to proportion. The named animal runs from 32% to 37%, protein converts to 28.9% of dry matter in every recipe, and carbohydrate lands between 44.7% and 49.0% of dry matter against 43.2% across cold-pressed food generally. Transparency is Outstanding on every recipe. Protein and processing lands on Good, value too, and nutritional balance Average, so the range gives you a lot of label for what it asks.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon (36%), sweet potato (27%), potato (20%), salmon protein (5%), salmon oil (5%), whole egg (5%), beet pulp, 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). Glucosamine (0.1%), green lipped mussel (0.05%) chondroitin sulphate (0.05%).

Cold pressing is Salubrious's whole platform, and pairing it with a grain-free base is not the common route, since the method suits cereals well. Here the pellet is pressed at low temperature and holds together without needing wheat or barley to bind it, and it breaks apart in water rather than swelling in the stomach.

The animal share is where the four separate: beef at 37%, lamb and salmon at 36% apiece, and chicken at 32%. Each recipe brings its own fat to match, beef tallow in one, lamb tallow in another, chicken oil and salmon oil in the last two. The headline animal therefore runs right through the recipe and does not just appear once at the top. What it does not do is stand alone, because salmon protein at 5% and whole egg at 5% are on all four lists.

The same base sits under every recipe, sweet potato at 27% with potato at 20%, and that sets the carbohydrate level. Beet pulp sits behind them as gentle fermentable fibre, inulin is named openly as the prebiotic with no marketing word to hide behind, and alfalfa adds a little more plant matter. There is no cereal of any kind, which is the reason to be here.

Which bag you pick up decides how much micronutrition is declared. The beef, lamb and salmon panels print vitamin A, vitamin D3 and vitamin E, while the chicken goes considerably further and prints doses for iodine, iron, copper, zinc, manganese and selenium as well. Plenty of far grander labels never bother with that level of detail. The chicken bag is the transparent one of the four, and that is worth knowing.

The tail of each label is generous. The herbal blend gives a dozen plants 0.25% between them, from chicory root and nettle leaf through to turmeric and aniseed. It is seasoning and not medicine, and the label is honest about that. Then come the joint ingredients: glucosamine at 0.1%, green lipped mussel at 0.05% and chondroitin sulphate at 0.05% on all four, with the beef adding collagen at 0.08% on top.

Salmon at 36% with salmon oil at 5% makes this the only recipe where the fish on every label is also the headline. It is the richest of the four, fat converting to 15.6% of dry matter and energy reaching an estimated 351 kcal per 100g. Portions run smaller on this one than on any of its siblings.

The beef and the chicken are £5.50 a kilo, the lamb £5.67 and the salmon £6.00. Each recipe comes as a 12 kg bag, a 3 kg bag or a sample bag of roughly 250 g.

Take a 15 kg adult dog in moderate condition at about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). A day's feeding then works out between £1.39 on the beef and £1.44 on the salmon. Portions run from roughly 239 g of the salmon, the densest of the four at 351 kcal per 100g, to about 256 g of the chicken.