Tesco Complete & Balanced Nutrition Adult Dry: Chicken & Vegetables review

Our scoring lands both recipes in our Average band, and it is a reading of the label more than of the bag. Nearly every entry that matters is a category name, so there is no way to tell what changed between batches, and the detail our scoring leans on simply is not printed. A typical adult dry food gets a band further, to our Good band, mostly by naming its parts.

Taken for what it actually is, a plain complete kibble with a fully dosed mineral panel behind it, this feeds an ordinary adult dog perfectly well. The two flavours read identically on the analysis, and the only gap between them is transparency, where the beef sits a band above the chicken, so otherwise it comes down to what your dog prefers.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives (22% including 4% Chicken in the Bone-shaped Kibble*), Oils and Fats, Vegetables (4% Peas in the Brown Barrel-shaped Kibble), Minerals, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin (0.5% Beet Pulp in the Bone-shaped kibble*), Yeasts. *Bone-shaped Kibble: typically 20% of product, Brown Barrel-shaped Kibble: typically 60% of product

The two kibble shapes in each bag are not decoration, they are how the recipe is organised. The named meat, whether beef or chicken, lives only in the shaped kibble that the label says is typically 20% of the product, alongside the 0.5% beet pulp. The brown barrel kibble that makes up around 60% carries the 4% peas. So the named animal is concentrated in a minority of what you pour. That is worth remembering when you read 4% on the front.

Everything else is written in categories. Cereals can be any grain. Oils and fats can be any oil at all, whether it came from a plant or from an animal, and derivatives of vegetable origin is broader again. These umbrella terms turn up on good recipes and thin ones alike, often for perfectly ordinary commercial reasons, so their presence proves nothing on its own. What they do prevent is a reader working out what they are actually feeding, which is the whole difficulty for a dog with a sensitivity.

The analysis is steady rather than striking. Protein reads 21.0% and fat 9.0%, converting to 22.8% and 9.8% of dry matter, with fibre at 3.0% and ash at 8.0%. No moisture figure is declared. Those dry matter numbers therefore use the usual 8% assumed for a kibble. Carbohydrate estimates to 55.4% of dry matter, above the 46.2% typical for adult dry food. Do the sums and that is what a cereal led recipe looks like. Energy comes out at 347 kcal per 100g.

The label is at its best in the added nutrition. Zinc is dosed 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. Vitamin E sits alongside them at 70 mg. The plain forms are used here, zinc as an oxide and selenium as sodium selenite. Chelated and yeast bound versions are generally taken up a little more readily. A complete panel printed with figures is still genuinely useful, and plenty of labels never manage it.

Yeasts close the list, and a small amount of yeast is a sensible inclusion: it brings B vitamins and a little palatability. The fibre entry is beet pulp at 0.5%, the fibrous material left when sugar is taken from sugar beet, and it helps keep a gut regular.

The named 4% is chicken, and it sits in the bone shaped kibble rather than the clover, again typically 20% of what is in the bag. Chicken is the lighter of the two flavours, and for a dog that has not eaten much red meat it is the more familiar start.

£1.00 a kilo, sold in 3kg and 12kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 242 grams a day, and that comes to £0.24 a day. The maths behind that assumes around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Both flavours read the same on energy, so the figure holds either way.