Wainwright's Adult Dry Food With Superfoods: British Pork with Superfoods review

Our scoring puts all three in the Good band, level with the middle of the adult dry category. The chicken is the strongest of them, and its protein and processing reads Good on the back of an animal share that reaches 51.5%.

The pork gives a little of that back. Its protein and processing reads Average, largely because potato protein and a vegetable digest are doing work that meat could have done, and its nutritional balance sits at Average too. The beef lands in the same place on both counts, since 40% sweet potato tips the balance towards the plant side. Across all three, transparency reads Outstanding and value Good, which is the fair summary of a range that prints its percentages and lets you check them.

Ingredients, as declared: Pork (36%) (Freshly Prepared Pork (26%), Pork Meal (10%)), Potato Flake, Sweet Potato Pellets (13%), Potato Protein, Rapeseed Oil, Vegetable Digest, Sugar Beet Pellets (2.5%), Dried Apple Pellets (1% equivalent to 6.5% Apple), Dried Carrot, Minerals, Alfalfa Pellets, Seaweed Meal (0.5%), Whole Linseed (0.5%), Chicory Root Extract (0.1%), Dried Blueberry, Dried Fennel (0.05%), Dried Nettle, Dried Parsley, Dried Rosemary, Dried Spinach, Extract of Yucca Schidigera (0.02%), Glucosamine (0.02%), Chondroitin (0.015%), Dried Peppermint, Turmeric

Each recipe splits its animal content in print, and the splits are worth reading carefully. The pork is 26% freshly prepared and 10% pork meal, and the beef 26% freshly prepared grass fed with 14.5% beef meal. The chicken is 26% freshly prepared free run bird, 20.5% chicken meal and 5% chicken fat. The water in fresh meat mostly boils off in the oven, so the meal share carries the protein into the finished kibble. The chicken's headline also includes a fat entry, which brings energy and not protein.

There is no cereal anywhere. Potato and potato flake do the binding, with sweet potato at 12.5% in the chicken, 13% in the pork and 40% in the beef. As a starch, sweet potato releases more slowly than most cereals and earns its place, but the beef's share is a large one and shows up in that recipe's nutrition reading.

The joint pair is printed on every label, glucosamine at 0.02% and chondroitin at 0.015%, with nothing left to implication. Being given percentages at all puts these ahead of the many labels that mention joint care and quantify nothing. At these levels they are steady background support, not a course of treatment.

Chicory root extract at 0.1% is the most useful of the small additions. It carries inulin, which the large intestine's friendly bacteria live on, and beet pulp behind it supplies both soluble and insoluble fibre. Seaweed at 0.5% brings iodine and a spread of other minerals, and alfalfa, carrot and apple fill in behind.

The blueberry, spinach, nettle, parsley and rosemary that give the range its name sit at the very bottom of each list. They do no harm and rosemary in particular earns its keep, a natural antioxidant that stops the fats turning, but a recipe is not transformed by a dusting of spinach. What these bags stand on is the meat share above, and that is exactly where the weight belongs.

Minerals are dosed openly too: zinc at 100mg, iron at 60mg, manganese at 50mg, copper at 8mg, iodine at 2.5mg and selenium at 0.1mg, alongside vitamin E at 70mg. Linseed at 0.5% is the omega 3 source throughout, and in plant form a dog takes longer to reach the skin-active types from it than from fish.

Pork at 26% freshly prepared and 10% pork meal, the least common meat of the three and the one a dog is least likely to have met before. That is exactly what makes it useful when you are trying to pin down a reaction. Sweet potato pellets sit at 13% here, dried apple at 1% stands in for 6.5% fresh apple, and fennel and peppermint join the botanical tail. Protein is declared at 24.0% and energy at 355 kcal per 100g.

£4.58 a kilo from the 12kg bag and £6.50 a kilo from the 2kg, the same across all three recipes.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats 225 to 239 grams a day depending on the flavour, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes out between £1.03 and £1.09 a day. The bags themselves ask 175 to 300 grams for a dog of 12kg to 25kg. Portion to the waistline before the table.