Trophy Pet Foods Trophy Lifestyle Working Dog Chicken & Corn review

Corn in first place and a modest declared meat share hold this recipe in the Good band. The middle of the adult dry shelf settles at that same mark. Look at what it does well, though, and the picture warms up. The chicken is honest about itself and named right down to the fat, and the mineral panel is dosed in print. The label carries neither wheat nor anything marine, a rare combination at this level. What stands between it and a higher band is construction, not a worry about the ingredients. For a working medium breed with no quarrel with grain, it does exactly the job it advertises.

Ingredients, as declared: Corn (min. 40%), Chicken (min. 23% chicken meal and 3% freshly prepared chicken), Rice, Barley, Chicken Fat, Unmolassed Beet Pulp, Peas, Minerals, Yeast, Yucca Schidigera, Rosemary, Blackcurrant, Pomegranate.

Corn at min. 40% is the backbone of this kibble and there is no disguising it. Maize is a workmanlike cereal, digestible once cooked and a steady source of energy, and here it is joined by rice and barley rather than by wheat. Barley brings useful fibre and a little selenium and copper along with it. Carbohydrate finishes at 56.5% of dry matter against the 46.2% typical for an adult dry food. A cereal-first construction gives you exactly that.

The chicken is declared in both forms, min. 23% as chicken meal and 3% freshly prepared. That order matters in the right way here, because the meal is already dried and its share holds through the oven, while the fresh portion shrinks as its water leaves. Protein converts to 22.8% of dry matter and fat to 10.9%.

What makes this label stand out is what is missing from it. Wheat is absent, so is fish oil, and there is no unnamed animal fat or unnamed derivative of any kind. Chicken fat is named as chicken fat, so a dog being kept strictly on one bird can eat this recipe without an asterisk hanging over it. That is genuinely hard to find on a plain kibble.

The supporting entries are modest and sensible. Unmolassed beet pulp at 3.0% is the fibre in the bowl. Peas add a little plant protein, plus a scattering of micronutrients. The yeast is in there to supply mannan oligosaccharides, a prebiotic the gut bacteria live on. Yucca schidigera has one job on this list, and it is stool odour.

Every mineral is printed with its dose, zinc at 123mg and manganese at 29mg per kilo. The forms are conventional sulphates and oxides, with no chelates among them. Rosemary closes the list as an antioxidant guarding the fats, with blackcurrant and pomegranate alongside it as seasoning rather than substance.

£2.97 a kilo, sold in 3kg and 14kg bags.

Assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs around 239 grams a day at this energy density. That puts the day rate at £0.71. Trophy's chart suggests 217 grams for that dog. A dog in real work will want the upper end of the two.