Vet's Kitchen Everyday Health review

Our reading places this in the Good band, level with the typical adult dry food. The meat is most of the reason: 37% dried chicken pushes protein to 32.6% of dry matter, and carbohydrate comes back to 40.2%, below the 46.2% a typical adult dry food carries. Transparency is the standout at Outstanding, with protein and processing, nutritional balance and value all Good. That is a tidy result for a recipe with rice at the front of its carbohydrate list, and it shows what a generous dried meat share does for an otherwise conventional bowl.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 45% (including Dried Chicken 37%, Chicken Fat 5%, Chicken Gravy 3%), Brown Rice 26%, White Rice, Oats, Beet Pulp, Minerals, Salmon Oil, Brewer's Yeast, Mannanoligosaccharides 315mg/kg, Fructooligosaccharides 315mg/kg, Glucosamine 180mg/kg, Methylsulfonylmethane 180mg/kg, Chondroitin Sulphate 125mg/kg, Yucca Schidigera Extract, Seaweed Oil Extract, Beta Glucans, Nucleotides.

The 45% chicken figure breaks into dried chicken at 37%, chicken fat at 5% and chicken gravy at 3%, and the first of those is the number that matters. There is no water left in dried meat to lose, so what goes into the mixer is close to what comes out the other end. By any standard 37% is a big share.

The starch is brown rice at 26%, with white rice behind it and oats adding fibre. Brown rice still has the bran and germ that get polished off white rice, so it brings more fibre and more micronutrients with it. Oats are about as gentle as a cereal gets on a dog's digestion. This is a grain inclusive recipe and makes no apology for it.

The joint set is written with numbers rather than left to the imagination: glucosamine and MSM at 180 mg/kg each, chondroitin sulphate at 125 mg/kg. Numbers let you judge a supplement instead of guessing at it. Salmon oil brings the marine omega 3s, with seaweed oil extract alongside.

The gut gets more attention here than most labels give it. Mannan and fructo oligosaccharides are both dosed at 315 mg/kg, with beta glucans and nucleotides behind them. A live Enterococcus faecium culture is named on the label as a gut flora stabiliser. Brewer's yeast adds a spread of B vitamins on top of all that.

The trace minerals are partly chelated. Zinc at 154mg, iron at 96mg and copper at 15mg per kilo each come in a chelated form alongside the usual sulphate, and a dog's gut handles that pairing more easily. L-carnitine at 56mg and methionine at 1,290mg finish the panel off.

£5.09 a kilo, sold in 3kg, 7.5kg and 12kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 228 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £1.16 a day. The label's own table asks 130 to 300 grams for a dog between 11kg and 25kg, a wide span, so let condition and waistline place your dog inside it.