Winner Adult: Lamb review

Our reading puts the chicken and the lamb in our Good band, alongside the typical adult dry food, and leaves the beef a step below them in Average. The reasons sit on the label, and not in the bowl. Maize leads every list, not one meat entry is given a percentage, and several working ingredients name no species. Estimated carbohydrate converts to between 52.3% and 55.8% of dry matter, where the typical adult dry food runs at 46.2%. Plenty of dogs do well on this and keep their shape. Read the band as a comment on how much the label tells you, and not as a warning about what goes in the bowl.

Ingredients, as declared: Maize, Dehydrated Lamb, Dehydrated Beef, Rice, Poultry Fat, Dehulled Oats, Whole Linseed, Beet Pulp, Digest, Minerals, Yeast Extract, Chicory Extract.

Maize is the first ingredient in all three recipes, and the meat that follows it is dehydrated rather than fresh. With only one meat entry on the list, that is the form you want. The drying happens first and the weighing second, so little of that listed weight disappears in the oven. The frustration is that no figure is attached, which leaves the analysis to answer instead: protein converts to between 23.1% and 25.3% of dry matter across the three.

Behind the maize the plant side is sensible and familiar. Dehulled oats bring fibre and a slower-releasing starch, and beet pulp adds the sort of bulk that helps a stool hold together. Whole linseed is the omega 3 source. Chicory extract carries inulin, and the bacteria further down the gut make good use of it.

The vaguest entries are the fat and the palatant. Poultry fat could have come from a chicken, a turkey, a duck or a goose, and the label does not say. In the beef and the lamb, the digest that makes a kibble taste of something is left unnamed too. Neither is unusual in a recipe built this way, and neither will bother most dogs. An elimination plan is the exception, since that needs every bird named.

Something else worth catching: dehydrated beef turns up in the chicken and the lamb recipes as well as the beef one. Rotating between the three changes the headline animal without ever taking the red meat out.

Iron and zinc at 100 mg, manganese at 40 mg, copper at 15 mg and iodine at 1.5 mg per kilo: every added mineral has its dose printed. They arrive in oxide and sulphate form, and chelates are the kind a dog absorbs more easily. That is a plain choice, and not a careless one.

Rice joins the maize and oats here, the only recipe in the range to carry it. Protein is declared at 23.0%, the highest of the three, converting to 25.3% of dry matter. Its estimated carbohydrate, at 52.3% of dry matter, is the lightest in the range.

£2.56 a kilo, with 3kg and 15kg bags offered in each of the three flavours.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 250 to 256 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £0.64 to £0.65 a day. For a dog that size the label's own table asks 230 to 275 grams, and the waistline can settle any difference.