Tesco Complete & Balanced Nutrition Senior Dry review

Our scoring puts this in the Average band, and the honest explanation is the label rather than the bag. Cereals, meat and animal derivatives, oils and fats and derivatives of vegetable origin are all category names, which means the recipe can only be read in outline. A food we can read only in outline cannot climb, because most of what our scoring rewards is detail we simply are not given. A typical adult dry food reaches our Good band largely by naming more of itself.

None of that means it fails the dog in front of you. What this label does declare is consistent and sensible for its audience: lean fat, a fully dosed mineral panel, and energy at 336 kcal per 100g against the 357 typical for a dry food. The same bowlful carries fewer calories than most. For a settled older dog, this bag does exactly what it was built for.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives (23%, including 4% Chicken in the Clover-shaped Kibble*), Oils and Fats, Vegetables (4% Peas in the Disc-shaped Kibble), Minerals, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin (0.5% Beet Pulp in the Clover-shaped Kibble*), Yeasts. *Clover-shaped Kibble: typically 40% of product, Disc-shaped Kibble: typically 40% of product

Category names do almost all the work on this list. Meat and animal derivatives, under European labelling rules, can cover anything from prime muscle meat down to the parts nobody advertises. Cereals can be any grain from oats to wheat, and derivatives of vegetable origin is broader still. Those terms are used by good and thin recipes alike, so their presence is not proof of anything poor. What they do mean is that you cannot know what changed between one bag and the next.

The one piece of daylight is the 4% chicken. It is named and weighted inside the clover shaped kibble. The rest of that 23% is not tied to any species at all, so pork, beef or lamb could each be in there. For a healthy older dog with no history of reactions that will never matter. If you are keeping a dog off a particular animal, this is ruled out as a trial food.

The analysis reads gently, which is the point of a senior recipe. Protein is 21.0%, converting to 22.8% of dry matter, and fat sits at 7.5%, or 8.2% of dry matter, genuinely lean for a kibble. Carbohydrate estimates to 52.0%, or 56.5% of dry matter, so starch is doing the heavy lifting. Fibre at 3.5% and a little beet pulp at 0.5% help a slower gut keep moving.

The mineral panel is fully dosed, more than plenty of far fancier labels manage. Zinc comes at 100 mg, iron at 60 mg, manganese at 50 mg, copper at 8 mg, iodine at 2.5 mg and selenium at 0.1 mg per kilo. Zinc arrives as an oxide and selenium as sodium selenite. Those are the plain forms, and they are generally taken up a little less readily than the chelated and yeast bound versions used in some recipes. Every figure being there in print still counts for something.

One quirk is worth a second look. The label says the clover shaped kibble is typically 40% of the product and the disc shaped kibble typically 40% as well, which leaves the rest of the bag unaccounted for in that note. It reads like an incomplete statement, nothing sinister. The named chicken and the beet pulp both live in the clover kibble, so the shape percentages are doing real work on this label.

£1.17 a kilo, sold in a 3kg bag.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 250 grams a day, and that comes to £0.29 a day. Each figure works from around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). An older dog doing less than that will usually need less, so portion to the waistline.