Vale Pet Foods Vale RAW Beef Tripe Minces: Chicken review

Every one of the four earns our Outstanding band. Raw is the fiercest field on our scoring, and the typical raw food stands in that same Outstanding band. So this family sits level with the middle of an exceptionally strong category, and nothing here falls short in everyday terms. Each mince reads Outstanding for protein and processing and for nutritional balance, with transparency close behind on Excellent and value Outstanding across all four, so the labels themselves give us nothing to complain about. Within the four, the wild rabbit and the salmon edge ahead of the poultry pair, though not by enough to override what your dog actually enjoys.

Ingredients, as declared: 70% Beef Tripe, 10% Chicken, 10% Chicken Bone, 10% Chicken Offal

Tripe is stomach, and it comes from a grazing animal. Raw feeders will go out of their way to buy it. Protein and fat are both plentiful, most guts take it easily, and the smell alone will persuade a dog who has been picking at dinner. At 70% of every recipe here, it is not a flavour note; it is the food.

The last 30% is where the four part company. Chicken and turkey arrive as three even tenths of meat and bone and offal, about as balanced as a partner animal can be. The turkey names its offal as kidney and liver. The salmon comes as whole fish with its bone. The rabbit is whole and wild but gutted, so it brings muscle and bone without the organ meats the other recipes carry.

Bone is the calcium story in a range with no added minerals, and the ash reading is where you see it. The chicken and turkey minces convert to 9.5% ash on a dry matter basis, in line with a tenth of the recipe being bone. The salmon reads 2.6% and the rabbit 3.0%, which is low for recipes that both declare bone in the mix, so those two are harder to read on minerals than the poultry pair.

The analyses look the way an all-animal recipe should. Protein converts to between 47.4% and 60.5% of dry matter and fat to between 35.5% and 55.3%, while carbohydrate estimates at zero on three of the four. The rabbit's 5.5% carbohydrate estimate is a by-difference artefact rather than an ingredient, since there is nothing starchy anywhere on its list.

There is no additives panel and no premix on any of these labels, which is a deliberate raw approach rather than an omission. It works best where the partner animal brings organs, as it does in the chicken and turkey minces. Liver and kidney hold much of a carcass's micronutrition. Feeders using the salmon or the rabbit will usually be running them as part of a wider rotation.

Chicken arrives behind the tripe in three even tenths of meat and bone and offal, the tidiest construction of the four. Protein converts to 60.5% of dry matter and ash to 9.5%, the signature of ground bone, with energy estimated at 184 kcal per 100g.

The Chicken mince is £4.85 a kilo and the Turkey is £5.10. All four flavours come in 1kg packs.

Run 110 × bodyweight^0.75 for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition and the standard maintenance estimate lands at about 840 kcal a day. On the estimated energy of these minces that is roughly 456 grams of either the chicken or the turkey, at £2.21 and £2.33 a day.