Vale Pet Foods Vale RAW Minces With Veg: Beef & Veg review

All five recipes reach our Outstanding band, and so does the typical raw food. That makes this range a full member of the strongest category we cover, not a passenger in it. Holding that band five times over, with a different animal each time, is the achievement here. Protein and processing and nutritional balance read Outstanding on every recipe, with transparency Excellent right across the family and value Outstanding on all five. The beef is the pick of the family on our reading, though the five sit close enough that you should be guided by which animal agrees with your dog.

Ingredients, as declared: 70% Beef (inc 10% Beef Bone), 10% Beef Offal (Kidney, Liver), 20% Vegetables (Broccoli, Carrot, Turmeric & Sea Kelp)

The arithmetic repeats exactly across the range, and that is what makes it easy to rotate. Each mince is 70% of the named meat with a tenth of the recipe as that animal's bone, then 10% of its kidney and liver, then 20% vegetables. Nothing else appears. There is no oil from another species, no premix and no unnamed fat, which is precisely why the single-animal claim holds up here when it fails on so many labels.

Bone inside the meat share is where the calcium comes from, since no mineral panel is printed. The ash readings track it, running from 3.0% of dry matter on the beef to 14.8% on the chicken. That is a wide spread for recipes declaring the same 10% bone, and worth knowing when you rotate between them.

Organ meats are given their own tenth in every recipe, named as kidney and liver. Much of a carcass's micronutrition sits in those organs. Fixing their share, and not leaving it to chance, is much of why these labels read so well.

The vegetable fifth is more considered than most raw ranges bother with. Broccoli and carrot bring fibre and antioxidants, with carrot a good source of vitamin A. Turmeric is the fashionable one but included in earnest across the set, and sea kelp is the iodine source that a no-premix recipe needs. The four are named, though the split between them is not published.

These analyses look exactly as an all-meat recipe should, with protein between 49.3% and 70.7% of dry matter and carbohydrate estimated at zero throughout. Energy moves a long way across the range, from an estimated 133 kcal per 100g on the venison to 269 kcal on the beef. A swap between recipes means a genuine change of portion, not a like for like scoop.

Beef and its bone lead at 70% with kidney and liver at 10%. The declared fat is the outlier of the family, converting to 79.3% of dry matter. That cannot sit alongside protein at 60.5% on the same basis, so treat the one number as a label quirk and go by your dog's condition. Energy is estimated at 269 kcal per 100g, the highest here.

The Chicken and Turkey minces are £5.40 a kilo, the Beef and Lamb are £6.50, and the Venison is £7.95. Every recipe comes in 1kg packs.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75 gives about 840 kcal a day. Daily portions run from around 312 grams on the beef up to 631 grams on the venison, which works out between £2.03 and £5.02 a day. The spread follows energy density as much as the per-kilo figure, since the leanest recipes feed in much larger portions.