Dibo Freeflow Dog Beef & Tripe

The hardest part of feeding raw is not the raw. It is the block: a solid slab that has to come out of the freezer a night early whether you wanted a small meal or a large one, and then sits in the fridge quietly going off when you guessed wrong. That is the reason people give up on it, far more often than anything to do with the meat.

Free-flow means the mince is frozen loose in bite-sized pieces rather than as a brick, so you take out what you need and the rest goes back. This one is 80% beef, 10% beef offal and 10% soft bone, in a 1kg bag. The declared analysis is crude protein 15.4%, fat 11.8%, crude fibre 1.9%, ash 1.1% and moisture 69.8%. Smaller pieces also defrost faster than a whole block, which is the difference between remembering the night before and remembering at lunchtime.

• 1kg bag of free-flow frozen mince
• 80% beef, 10% beef offal, 10% soft bone
• Crude protein 15.4%, fat 11.8%
• Crude fibre 1.9%, ash 1.1%, moisture 69.8%
• Bite-sized pieces, so it defrosts quicker than a block
• A complementary food rather than a complete one

Complementary is the most important word on this bag. An eighty-ten-ten mince is meat, offal and bone and nothing else - there is no added vitamin or mineral premix - so fed on its own day after day it is not a balanced diet. It is a base to build a bowl on, or a topper, and moving a dog onto raw properly is a conversation to have with your vet or a qualified canine nutritionist before you start rather than after. Two practical points: there is soft bone in it at 10%, so it is not a bone-free mince, and no feeding quantity and no calorie figure have been supplied, which is exactly what you would need to portion it accurately.

Who it's for: raw feeders who already know what they are building a bowl out of, and anyone who wants to add raw meat to an existing diet without defrosting a whole block to do it.