Waitrose Complete & Balanced Senior Dry review

This lands in our Average band while the typical adult dry food reaches Good, and the distance between them is almost entirely about naming. Protein and processing comes out Poor with nutritional balance and transparency both Average, because each of them asks what is really in the food and the pack answers in categories. Nothing in the analysis raises an eyebrow. Protein converts to a respectable 29.3% of dry matter, fat to a lean 8.7%, and carbohydrate to an estimated 46.8%, essentially level with the 46.2% typical of adult dry food. For an old dog with a settled stomach and a waistline to keep an eye on, it lives up to the front of the pack.

Worth saying plainly: a low band here is not a warning about safety. What it measures is how much a label lets you check, and this one lets you check very little.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals (32% Wholegrains), Meat and Animal Derivatives (32%, of which 4% Chicken Meal), Vegetables (4% Pea Flour), Derivatives of Vegetable Origin (3.5% Beet Pulp, 0.02% Yucca Extract), Oils and Fats, Seeds (1% Linseed), Minerals, Molluscs and Crustaceans (0.02% Glucosamine), Fish and Fish Derivatives (0.01% Chondroitin).

Cereals at 32% wholegrains open the list, and the wholegrain description does real work, since keeping the bran and germ in brings fibre and B vitamins that a refined grain would have lost. The grain itself is never named, so it may vary between production runs.

Meat and animal derivatives are also declared at 32%, a step up on the adult version of this recipe, and only 4% of that is identified, as chicken meal. The phrase covers everything from prime material to the plainest parts of a carcass, which is precisely why it cannot be graded. What can be said is that around a third of the recipe is animal in origin, and that is a reasonable quantity in this part of the market.

Fat is where the senior brief shows most clearly. It is declared at 8.0%, converting to 8.7% of dry matter, notably lean, and the energy figure of 330 kcal per 100g sits under the 357 typical of adult dry food. That pairing is the whole point of the bag once an older dog's walks have shortened.

The named entries are small and useful: pea flour at 4%, beet pulp at 3.5% for fibre, linseed at 1% for plant omega 3 and yucca extract at 0.02%. The linseed omega 3 arrives in its plant form, and a dog is slow to convert that. Think of it as a background contribution.

The joint pair is the most interesting piece of labelling here. Glucosamine appears under molluscs and crustaceans, which is where it usually comes from, since shellfish shells are its richest source, and chondroitin under fish and fish derivatives. That is the entire reason fish shows up on this recipe at all, and at 0.02% and 0.01% neither is present in any real quantity.

Sold in a 2.5kg bag at £1.76 a kilo.

On the same basis of about 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), the portion is around 255 grams and the daily figure £0.45. The pack asks 215 to 373 grams for a dog between 12kg and 25kg, and an older dog will usually want the lower end of that.