Barking Heads Large Breed Bowl Lickin' Chicken ( Formally Big Food Tender Loving Care)

Large breeds carry proportionally more weight through the same four joints as a dog half their size, and it tends to show up years before anyone notices a limp - in how quickly they tire on a walk, or how stiffly they get up from a nap. A food aimed specifically at big dogs earns its keep less on flavour than on what it does for cartilage over a decade of that extra load.

This is Barking Heads' large-breed recipe under a new name - The makers still list it as "formerly Big Food Tender Loving Care", so if you have bought the older bag before, this is the same food. Chicken makes up 50% of it, just over half of that freshly prepared and the rest dried with a little gravy and fat, alongside rice, oats and peas for the bulk of the carbohydrate. Glucosamine, chondroitin sulphate and beta glucans are built into the everyday recipe rather than sold as a separate joint supplement.

• Chicken 50% (31% freshly prepared free-run chicken, 14% dried)
• Protein 24%, fat 14%, fibre 3.5%, ash 7.5%, 370 kcal/100g
• Glucosamine and chondroitin sulphate added for joint support
• Rice, oats and peas rather than a grain-free recipe
• Vitamin E, taurine and L-carnitine included
• 12kg bag

One thing worth knowing. This recipe is not grain-free - rice and oats make up a large share of it - so if you are specifically looking for a grain-free large-breed food, this isn't it. Barking Heads also don't print a simple weight-to-grams table for it; you use their online calculator with your dog's age, weight and activity level, so you can't read a daily portion straight off this page.

Who it's for: owners of large and giant breeds who want a joint-support recipe without needing it to be grain-free, and anyone who has bought this food before under its old name and wants to know it hasn't changed.