Southend Dog Training Southend Dog Adult Raw: Venison & Duck review

All six flavours sit in our Outstanding band. The typical adult raw food sits there too. Raw is a strong category, and this range holds its own in it. The six finish close together on our scoring, so let your dog's protein history pick the tub.

Ingredients, as declared: Duck with Bone (35%), Venison Meat (25%), Beef Tripe (10%), Venison with Bone (10%), Beef Kidney (2.5%), Beef Liver (2.5%), Carrot (6%), Butternut Squash (4%), Green Vegetables (3.5%), Blueberry (1%), Kelp (0.3%), Salmon Oil (0.15%), Wheatgrass Powder (0.05%), ✔ No artificial additives✔ No fillers✔ No preservatives

The construction is classic raw feeding. Bone-in meat leads each recipe, so the calcium arrives in the food itself with no mineral pack needed. The organ meats bring the dense micronutrition that makes offal the richest part of the animal. Tripe sits alongside them, which most dogs treat as the best news on the label.

The headline meat is declared with a percentage on every tub, from beef heart at 40% through turkey at 70%, chicken at 75% and lamb and wild boar at 80%. Protein converts to roughly half of dry matter or more across the range. The carbohydrate estimate never climbs past 9.0% of dry matter, and on most of the six it sits below the 5.0% typical of adult raw food. This is meat, bone and organs with a vegetable garnish, exactly as the tubs present themselves.

Whichever animal fronts the recipe, beef does the organ work behind it: tripe, kidney and liver appear in every flavour, and the beef tub borrows bone-in turkey for its skeletal share. Nutritionally that is all to the good. For allergen management it matters, because a dog that reacts to beef has no refuge anywhere in the range, and salmon oil means every tub carries fish as well.

The vegetable fraction is small and sensible: carrot, butternut squash and green vegetables with a little blueberry. Kelp brings trace minerals, and the wheatgrass at the tail is a grass shoot, not a cereal grain, so the grain-free promise survives its slightly alarming name. None of this fraction does heavy lifting, and the brief entries on the labels are honest about that.

The one deliberately twin-protein recipe, with duck with bone at 35% joined by venison meat at 25% and bone-in venison at 10%. It is also the most fully itemised label in the range, printing a percentage for everything down to wheatgrass powder at 0.05%.

The chicken is £4.47 a kilo and every other flavour is £4.92. Packs run from 1kg (2 tubs) to 50kg (100 tubs), with 5kg, 10kg, 15kg, 20kg, 30kg and 40kg steps in between.

As a guide, feeding works out at between £2.50 and £3.44 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for a 15kg dog is 450 grams a day.