Wainwright's Adult Dry Food With Superfoods: Grass Fed Beef 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: Beef (40.5%) (Freshly Prepared Grass Fed Beef 26%, Beef Meal 14.5%), Sweet Potato (40%), Beet Pulp (8%), Rapeseed Oil, Vegetable Stock, Minerals, Linseed (0.5%), Dried Carrot (0.5%, equivalent to 4% Carrot), Seaweed Meal (0.5%), Chicory Root Extract (as a source of prebiotic FOS) (0.1%), Dried Spinach, Dried Blueberry, Dried Nettle, Dried Parsley, Dried Rosemary, Yucca Extract (0.02%), Glucosamine (0.02%), Chondroitin (0.015%), Turmeric (0.005%), Dried Spearmint.

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.

Grass fed beef at 26% freshly prepared and 14.5% beef meal, over sweet potato at 40%, the single largest plant entry anywhere in the range. It carries the most fibre of the three at 4.0%, thanks to beet pulp at 8%, and calcium is declared here alone, at 1.21% of dry matter.

£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.