You are standing in the aisle, or scrolling a product page, holding two foods that both say natural, both say complete, both have a photograph of a happy dog on the front, and differ by eleven pounds. Everything useful is on the back, in six point type, in words nobody explains. This is that explanation.
The good news is that a UK dog food label is not marketing. Most of it is legally required, it is laid out in a fixed order, and once you know what the four or five blocks are called you can compare any two foods in about ninety seconds. The front of the bag is where the persuasion happens. The back is where the facts are.
The short answer: the six things worth reading
- Composition. The ingredients, listed heaviest first. Read the first three.
- The percentages. A named percentage next to a meat is worth more than any adjective on the front.
- Analytical constituents. Protein, fat, fibre and ash. Four numbers, and they tell you less than you think.
- Complete or complementary. One is a meal. The other is not, however much it looks like one.
- The feeding guide. The only portion figure that is correct for that specific food.
- Best before, batch code and who made it. Boring until the day you need them.
1. Composition: the order is the whole point
Every ingredient in a UK or EU pet food has to be listed under Composition in descending order of weight. That single rule does most of the work for you. Whatever is named first is the largest single thing in the bag, and whatever is named last is a rounding error.
So read the first three and stop worrying about the last ten. A food whose first three are a named meat, a named carbohydrate and a second named meat is built differently from one whose first three are three different cereals, whatever the front of the bag says about them both.
One catch worth knowing: weight is measured before cooking. Fresh meat is mostly water, so a recipe that leads with fresh chicken has less chicken left in the finished kibble than the position suggests. A meal, as in chicken meal, is the dried version, so it keeps its position honestly. Neither is a trick, but it is why two bags can list chicken first and contain very different amounts of it.
Named ingredients or categories
There are two legal ways to write the composition, and the difference matters more than anything on the front of the pack.
By specific name: Wheat, Rice (16%), Chicken (20%). You can see exactly what is in there.
By category: Cereals, Meat and Animal Derivatives, Oils and Fats, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin. Perfectly legal, and it lets a manufacturer swap between ingredients as prices and supply change, which can genuinely keep a food affordable. It also means you do not know which meat your dog ate this month, or whether it was the same one as last month.
If your dog is fine on everything, a category declaration is not a problem. If you are avoiding a specific protein, a category declaration makes the food untestable, because meat and animal derivatives could be anything. That is the single most useful thing this whole guide has to tell you, and it is why our elimination diet guide tells you to check the panel on the bag you are already feeding before you start.
2. The percentages, and why "with chicken" means almost nothing
UK rules set minimum percentages for ingredient claims on the front of a pack. They are lower than most people assume. According to UK Pet Food, the industry body:
- "With chicken" or "contains chicken" means at least 4%.
- "Rich in chicken" or "high in chicken" means at least 14%.
- "Chicken dinner" or "chicken and rice menu", where the ingredient is in the product name itself, means at least 26%.
Four per cent. A tin that is 96% other things can legally say "with chicken" on the front in large friendly letters, next to a photograph of a chicken. And if there is a picture of an ingredient on the pack, the percentage has to appear in the composition, which is a quiet little rule that is often the fastest way to find the real number.
So the useful habit is simple: ignore the adjective, find the number. A bag that prints Chicken Meal 20% in the composition has told you something. A bag that says "packed with real chicken" and prints no figure has not.
3. A real label, read properly
Rules are easier to see in an actual example, so here is the back of a bag we sell, Country Pursuit Chicken & Rice 15kg, £45.99, printed exactly as it appears on the pack.
Composition: Maize, Chicken Meal 20%, Rice 16%, Barley, Fish Meal, Sugar Beet Pulp, Chicken Fat, Whole Linseed, Minerals, Sodium Chloride, Chicory, Yucca Extract.
Read it the way we just described. The first ingredient is maize, not chicken. The second is chicken meal, declared at 20%, and the third is rice at 16%. Everything is named specifically, nothing hides behind a category, and the two ingredients a buyer cares about carry printed percentages.
Now, is a maize-first food a bad food? No, and it is worth being clear about why, because this is exactly the point where a label gets misread. This is a working and active dog recipe built on cereal energy, which is what a dog doing a day's work actually burns. It is a complete food, it names everything, and it declares its meat content openly, which is better practice than a great many foods that lead with a meat and then go vague. What the label lets you do is decide knowingly rather than be sold to. A dog that lies on the sofa until six o'clock is a different brief from a spaniel working a field all day, and the bag tells you which one it was designed for in the line perfect for working and active dogs.
Compare it with the other end of our range. Pure Kangaroo, £4.19 for a 400g tin, is 100% kangaroo meat and offal and nothing else, with added vitamins and minerals so that it still qualifies as complete. There is no ingredient ranking to read, because there is only one ingredient. That is not better in the abstract. It is better for a particular job, which is knowing with certainty what a dog has eaten.
4. Analytical constituents: four numbers, and their limits
Every dog food has to declare, as a minimum, crude protein, fat content, crude fibre and crude ash, plus moisture if the food is more than 14% water, which is why wet food always shows it and kibble usually does not.
On the Country Pursuit bag those read: Crude Protein 23%, Crude Fat 12%, Crude Fibre 2.5%, Crude Ash 6%.
- Crude protein is total protein by analysis. It does not say where the protein came from, or how digestible it is. A high figure from poor sources is worth less than a modest figure from good ones.
- Fat is the main energy source and the main driver of how calorific a food is.
- Crude fibre affects stool quality more than anything else you will notice day to day.
- Crude ash is not ash. It is the total mineral content left after the organic matter is burned off in a laboratory. A number around 6 to 9% is ordinary, and a slightly higher figure in a meat-rich food usually just means bone.
The big limitation: comparing wet and dry food on these numbers directly is meaningless. A tin that is 78% water cannot show the same protein percentage as a kibble that is 8% water, even if a dog ends up eating identical protein. If you want to compare across the two, you have to work on the dry matter, and honestly, most owners never need to. Our wet versus dry guide covers the practical version of that question.
5. Additives: a longer list is not a worse food
Anything listed under Additives has to be grouped by what it does, and named with its amount. You will typically see nutritional additives, meaning the vitamins and trace elements, and then preservatives, antioxidants, colourants and flavourings, which may be named by their functional group alone.
The Country Pursuit bag prints Vitamin A 15,000 IU, Vitamin D3 2,750 IU and Vitamin E 100mg per kilo, then its trace elements with the exact chemical form of each: iron as iron sulphate monohydrate, zinc as zinc oxide, copper as copper sulphate pentahydrate, and so on down to selenium at 0.1mg.
That block looks alarmingly chemical and it is the most benign part of the label. A complete food has to deliver a full set of vitamins and minerals, and they have to come from somewhere. The additives worth a second look are colourants. Dog food is coloured for the human buying it, since dogs are not choosing by shade, so a recipe with no added colour has simply skipped a step that was never for your dog. Antioxidants are a genuine preservative function, and whether they are natural, usually tocopherols from vitamin E, or artificial is a fair thing to check.
6. Complete or complementary: the word that decides whether it is a meal
Every pet food is one or the other, and the label has to say which.
Complete means the food provides everything a dog needs in a day, when fed according to the instructions on the pack. Complementary means it does not, and has to be fed alongside something else. Mixers, toppers, most treats and all supplements are complementary.
This is the one that quietly catches people out. A tray of something that looks exactly like dinner, smells like dinner and is sold next to the dinners can still be complementary, in which case feeding it as the whole meal leaves a gap. It is worth thirty seconds to check before you buy a case of anything new. All of our wet food and dry food is complete, which is not a boast, it is just what you should be checking.
7. The feeding guide beats every chart on the internet, including ours
The feeding table printed on the pack is matched to that food's energy density, which varies enormously between recipes. Two bags of kibble can differ by a third in calories per 100g, so the same scoop delivers very different amounts of food.
The Country Pursuit bag is a good illustration: it asks for 275 to 475g a day for a dog of 12 to 25kg, which is a long way above the rule of thumb most owners carry in their head. That is not a mistake. It is a 372 kcal per 100g food, which is on the lower side, so a dog needs more grams of it to get the same energy. A denser food would ask for far less. Start with the number on your bag, feed it for a fortnight, then adjust by what you can feel along your dog's ribs. Our guide to how much dry food to feed goes through that properly.
8. Best before, batch code, and who actually made it
The best before date tells you how long the manufacturer guarantees the nutrients, particularly the vitamins, which degrade over time. It is a quality date rather than a safety one, and it assumes the bag is unopened.
The batch code is how a specific production run is identified, exactly as in human food. It is the thing you will be asked for if you ever need to report a problem or check a recall, and it is the main reason to keep the bag rather than tip the kibble into a bin.
The manufacturer's name, address and contact details are required too. On the Country Pursuit bag that is Judge's Choice Petfood Ltd in Haywards Heath, with a phone number and a website printed alongside. Being able to see who actually makes a food, as opposed to whose logo is on the front, is quietly one of the more useful things on there.
What the label will not tell you
Three honest gaps, because a guide that pretends the label answers everything is not much use.
Calories are not compulsory. Energy content is a voluntary declaration in the UK, so plenty of foods simply do not print it. Of the foods we sell, Country Pursuit is the one that publishes kcal per 100g on the product page, at 372 for the chicken recipe and 360 for the lamb. We would rather every brand did, and we have said so to the ones that do not.
Digestibility is not declared. Two foods can show the same protein figure and deliver very different amounts of usable protein, and no label number will show you that. The only real test is your own dog, over a few weeks.
Ingredient quality within a category is not declared. Chicken meal is chicken meal, whether it is good chicken meal or indifferent chicken meal. Brand reputation and a specific, named, percentage-carrying composition are the best proxies you have.
Four questions to ask of any bag
- What are the first three ingredients? Not the first twelve. The first three.
- Are the meats named, with percentages? If it says meat and animal derivatives, you cannot rule anything in or out.
- Complete or complementary? One word, and it decides whether this is a meal.
- Does the front claim match the back? A "rich in salmon" that turns out to be 14% is doing exactly what the law allows and nothing more.
Where to start
If you want foods where the label does the explaining for you, the Happy Dog Sensible range is single protein, grain free and potato based, from £8.29 for a 1kg bag to £64.69 for 12.5kg. AATU runs an 80/20 recipe, 80% named meat or fish and 20% fruit, vegetables and botanicals, from £22.79. And the Pure wet range is a single named protein with nothing else in the tin, from £3.79.
If what sent you here was a dog reacting to something, read the sensitive stomachs guide next, and if you are trying to work out which protein is genuinely unfamiliar to your dog, the novel protein guide compares them properly.
Free UK delivery on orders over £30.
Frequently asked questions
What should the first ingredient be in dog food?
Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight, so the first one is the largest part of the food. For most pet dogs a named meat first is a reasonable thing to look for, but it is not an absolute rule: working and active dog recipes are often built on a cereal for energy, and that is a design choice rather than a fault. What matters more is whether the ingredients are named specifically and whether the meat carries a printed percentage.
What does "with chicken" mean on a dog food label?
In the UK, "with" or "contains" an ingredient means the food has to include at least 4% of it. "Rich in" or "high in" means at least 14%, and naming the ingredient in the product itself, as in a chicken dinner, means at least 26%. So "with chicken" is a far weaker claim than it sounds, and the number in the composition panel is the only thing that settles it.
What are analytical constituents on dog food?
They are the laboratory analysis of the food, and UK dog food must declare at least crude protein, fat content, crude fibre and crude ash, plus moisture if the food is over 14% water. Crude ash is not ash: it is the total mineral content. These numbers describe quantity, not quality or digestibility, and they cannot be compared directly between wet and dry food because of the water difference.
What does "meat and animal derivatives" mean?
It is a legal category name rather than a specific ingredient, and it lets a manufacturer vary which animal proteins are used between batches, which can keep the food affordable. It is not a safety issue, but it does mean you cannot tell which animal your dog has eaten. If you are avoiding a particular protein, or running an exclusion trial, a food declared this way cannot be used.
What is the difference between complete and complementary dog food?
A complete food provides everything a dog needs in a day when fed as instructed. A complementary food does not, and is meant to be fed alongside something else: mixers, toppers, treats and supplements are all complementary. The label has to state which it is, and it is worth checking before you buy a case of something new.
Do dog food labels have to show calories?
No. Energy content is a voluntary declaration in the UK, so many foods do not print it, which makes comparing two foods on cost per calorie harder than it should be. The feeding guide on the pack is matched to that food's energy density, so it is the most reliable portion figure available to you even when the calorie figure is missing.
Featured in this guide: Country Pursuit Chicken & Rice 15kg (£45.99) · Pure Kangaroo Wet Dog Food (from £4.19) · Happy Dog Africa (from £8.29) · AATU Free Run Turkey (from £22.79). Free UK delivery over £30.