Southend Dog Training Southend Dog Cold Pressed: Venison & Duck review

The spread across these six is the interesting part. Pork comes out top in our Excellent band, with the beef and the trout and salmon alongside it. The beef and reef, the chicken and the venison and duck finish a band down in Good. Since cold-pressed food typically lands in our Good band, none of the six falls short of its category and the strongest of them sit a band above it.

What separates them is what the labels actually contain. Protein and processing reads Excellent on all six, and transparency is where they part company, with the pork reading Outstanding and both the beef and reef and the trout and salmon reading Excellent. The beef gives some ground back for a plant protein sitting among its animal entries, and the chicken for a fat that its own marketing summary describes more loosely than the ingredients list does. Nutritional balance reads Average across most of the six and Good on the trout and salmon, so the differences are about what goes in rather than how the analysis reads.

Ingredients, as declared: Quality Meat Content 34%, Ground duck (25%), sweet potato, potato, venison (8%), linseed oil, hydrolysed vegetables, dried apples, dried kale, chicory fibre, seaweed, spirulina, green lipped mussel (1%), mannan-oligosaccharides, glucosamine, chondroitin sulphate. 🦆 Ground Duck (25%) - rich, digestible protein, 🦌 Venison (8%) - lean, novel protein, 🍠 Sweet Potato & Potato - slow-release energy, 🌿 Spirulina, Kale & Seaweed - natural vitamins, Total meat content around 34%, balanced with natural ingredients.

The whole range is cold pressed. The mixture is compacted into pellets at a low temperature, with no extruder blasting it through. In water the pellet crumbles away, and it does not swell. The method has become the format of choice for owners who want something closer to home cooking without leaving dry food behind.

Hydrolysed meat turns up on several of these lists, alongside the ground meat and never in place of it. Hydrolysing breaks protein into smaller fragments that digest easily and taste good. Here it works as a second animal entry, and it lifts the total meat figure. It is worth noticing that the itemised percentages and the headline meat content on a couple of labels do not line up exactly, so the itemised entries are the ones to trust.

Sweet potato and potato carry five of the six recipes, while the pork turns to peas and tapioca. Tapioca is starch and very little besides, common enough in grain free food but worth knowing. Carbohydrate lands between 42.3% and 47.2% of dry matter across the range, which straddles the 43.2% typical for cold-pressed food.

The green additions are more than decoration. Spirulina appears on most labels, with seaweed and dried kale alongside it. Seaweed in particular is a natural source of iodine and a long list of minerals. That matters more than usual here, because no separate vitamin and mineral panel is published for any of these recipes. Dried apples and chicory fibre add gentle fibre, and mannan oligosaccharides are a yeast derived prebiotic that supports the population of friendly bacteria in the gut.

Every recipe closes with glucosamine and chondroitin sulphate, and most add green lipped mussel at 1%. Chondroitin comes from animal cartilage and is a familiar joint ingredient, and the mussel is the one to register for a shellfish free household. The pork label goes furthest of the six, adding L tryptophan, taurine, lutein, carnitine at 50 mg/kg and mannan oligosaccharides at 500 mg/kg, all quantified where it matters.

Ground duck at 25% with venison at 8% gives this recipe the most novel pairing on the shelf, handy when the usual meats have all been tried already. Linseed oil, spirulina, kale and seaweed follow, along with green lipped mussel at 1%, and one entry reads hydrolysed vegetables without naming which. Calcium is declared at 2.17% of dry matter, the highest in the range, and carbohydrate converts to 43.4%.

The beef, the beef and reef, the chicken and the pork are £6.00 a kilo, the trout and salmon £6.60 and the venison and duck £7.10. Every recipe comes in a 10kg or a 3kg bag.

For a 15 kg adult dog in moderate condition, take about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). Portions then run from roughly 227 g of the trout and salmon, the densest recipe at 370 kcal per 100g, to about 249 g of the lighter ones. That puts a day's feeding between £1.45 and £1.76 depending on which recipe you choose.