Simpsons Premium Senior/Light review

This recipe finishes near the top of our Average band, a step below the Good band that the typical adult dry food calls home. The lift comes from a decent named-meat share, a fat figure held sensibly low for the job in hand and a full set of gut and joint extras. Against that sits a starch load doing plenty of the carrying at 50.0% of dry matter. On a light food that is exactly the trade you would expect to make, and this one comes out on the right side of it.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (min 35.5% Dried Chicken, Deboned Chicken), Brown Rice (min 31%) Maize, Oats, Beet Pulp, Brewers Yeast, Dried Egg, Chicken Gravy (3%) Chicken Fat (2%), Salmon Oil, Minerals, Linseeds, Vitamins, Yucca Extract, Cranberries, Nucleotides, Mannanoligosaccharides (MOS), Fructooligosaccharides (FOS), L-Carnitine, Glucosamine, MSM, Chondroitin. Naturally preserved with mixed tocopherols.

Chicken at a minimum of 35.5% opens the list as a mix of dried and deboned. Dried is the useful word there. Water is out of it before cooking starts, and the figure holds up through the oven better than a fresh-meat headline does. Protein converts to 26.1% of dry matter, the same as the brand's full-fat adult recipes, and that is the point of a light food. You take the fat down, not the protein.

The main carrier is brown rice at a minimum of 31%. Maize and oats follow, and beet pulp adds gentle fibre. Estimated carbohydrate reaches 50.0% of dry matter against the 46.2% typical of adult dry food, a little above the middle. Take the fat down and the space it leaves has to be filled by something.

Fat is declared at 10.0%, reached by using chicken fat at only 2% and letting salmon oil and linseeds cover the essential fatty acids. Energy is estimated at 330 kcal per 100g where the typical adult dry food carries 357, so the same weight in the bowl brings less with it. That is the whole trick of a light diet.

What sets the lighter recipe apart is the L-Carnitine. The body uses that amino acid to move fat where it can be burned, and weight-control diets have carried it for years. No quantity is printed against it, so take it as a helpful passenger rather than the engine of the diet.

Everything else carries over from the brand's adult food: glucosamine, MSM and chondroitin for the frame, MOS and FOS as prebiotics, with nucleotides, brewers yeast, cranberries and yucca extract behind them. The vitamins and minerals appear as two unadorned words with no panel breaking them out, so you can take the food as complete without being able to check a single figure for yourself.

Simpsons Premium Senior/Light is £4.95 a kilo, sold in 2kg and 12kg bags with a 2 x 12kg option.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 255 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), which comes to £1.26 a day. Simpsons puts the range at 180 to 265 grams for a dog between 15kg and 25kg, and on a light food the waistline settles it.