Walker & Drake Small Bite Cold Pressed: Ocean Fish review

The chicken and the duck earn our Excellent band, and the ocean fish our Good band alongside the middle of the cold-pressed field. Shrinking the pellet has taken nothing away from the recipe behind it. The strengths here are simple: every list leads with a named dried meat, and the vitamin and trace element panel is itemised in full. What stops the range rising further is the plant-heavy middle section of each label and a moisture figure that is never declared, which leaves part of the analysis resting on an assumption. Nutritional balance reads Good throughout. On the chicken and the duck, protein and processing and transparency are both Excellent.

Ingredients, as declared: Dried Ocean Fish 35%, Sweet Potato, Potato, Pea Protein, Brewers Yeast, Beet Pulp, Salmon Oil, FOS Inulin, Yeast Bio-Mos, Psyllium Husk Powder, Apple, Carrot, Tomato, Seaweed, Cranberry, Flavour Bioflavex, Glucosamine, Fenugreek, Green Tea Extract, Fennel Seed, Blueberry, Yucca Schidigera, Chondroitin, Marigold Powder

Pellet size is the whole difference between this line and the standard bags, and for a small dog it is not a small thing. A terrier or a toy breed that has to wrestle with a large pellet often eats less than it should, or bolts what it can manage. A smaller piece removes the obstacle without a single ingredient changing.

Each recipe leads on dried meat, at 40% for the chicken, 39% for the duck and 35% for the ocean fish. Drying before weighing means those percentages describe the pellet in the bowl, not a wet weight that disappears in production. Protein is declared at 32.0% as fed right across the three.

Starch comes from sweet potato and potato, and there is no wheat, barley or rice anywhere in the line. Beet pulp appears in the chicken and the ocean fish recipes and psyllium husk in all three, both of them there to steady digestion. Brewers yeast contributes B vitamins and a savoury note that fussy small dogs tend to appreciate.

FOS inulin and yeast Bio-Mos are the two prebiotics here, feeding the gut bacteria and not the dog. Behind them each list turns to apple, carrot, tomato, seaweed and cranberry, then a run of botanicals that ends at marigold powder. Only the seaweed is present in a quantity doing obvious nutritional work, as a source of iodine, and the rest is character.

Glucosamine and chondroitin appear in every recipe with no printed dose against them. They are a supportive gesture towards joints, not a measured treatment. The vitamin and trace element panel is the opposite: fully itemised, with a per-kilo figure on every entry from vitamin A through to iron.

None of the three declares a moisture figure, and the dry-matter column here runs on the 8% standard used for cold-pressed food. On that basis carbohydrate converts to 41.3% for the chicken, 41.0% for the duck and 38.4% for the ocean fish, each of them under the 43.2% that is typical of the format.

Dried ocean fish at 35%, the smallest meat inclusion of the three, with pea protein helping the protein figure along and salmon oil supplying the fat. Crude ash is declared at 13.0%, which fits a dried fish bringing its own bone, and carbohydrate converts to 38.4% of dry matter, the lightest starch load in the line.

The chicken is £5.80 a kilo, and the duck and the ocean fish are £6.20. Each recipe comes in a 10kg bag.

The maker's low activity guide puts a 3 to 5kg dog at 65 to 96 grams a day, and a 5 to 10kg dog at 96 to 161 grams. For a like-for-like comparison with other foods, take a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That dog would eat around 233 grams, £1.35 a day on the chicken and £1.45 on either of the others.