Home / Cat food / Natural Balance / Reserve Grain Free Duck & Green Pea Recipe

product photo
coming soon
no verified photo yet — never a mockup

Natural Balance · brand facts & recall history →

Reserve Grain Free Duck & Green Pea Recipe

Dry food · adult cats

A formulated-to-meet dry food from Natural Balance, lighter per cup than 78% of the dry cat foods we've verified. Cat-food pricing isn't in our corpus for this SKU yet, so cost-per-day isn't shown — the composition numbers below are fully verified.

THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference cat 10 lb · updated 2026-07-12

Your catupdates every number on this page
10 lb

Joint, kidney, dental or heart concerns? Labels can't honestly answer those — that's vet territory. Why we don't checkmark them →

The evidence

The Verified Label

Every food on this site gets this exact panel — same fields, same order, sourced from the official label — so brands finally become comparable. Dots show where this food sits among all 283 dry cat foods we've verified.

Verified LabelThe standardized pet-food panel
VPFD № NATURA
verified 2026-07-12

Composition — dry-matter basis

why dry matter
Moisture hides the real recipe: dry food is ~5-10% water, wet food ~75-82%. Removing water puts every food on one scale, so these are the only nutrition numbers that can be compared across foods. As-fed label values shown small.
Protein Not yet verifiedlabel min: —% no corpus anchor for this value
Fat 13.3%label: 12% min no corpus anchor for fat yet
Fiber 5%label: 4.5% max typical — the median dry cat food is 4.5%
Est. carbohydrates ash not disclosed → 8% assumed, so this is an estimate Not yet verifiedneeds protein/fat/fiber no corpus anchor for this value
Magnesium as fed: not yet verified
why 0.12% DM
A commonly cited veterinary target for helping manage struvite-crystal (urinary) risk in cats is magnesium under roughly 0.12% on a dry-matter basis. This is a general, label-checkable guideline — not a diagnosis, and not a substitute for your vet, especially for cats with a history of urinary issues.
 Not yet verifiedmagnesium no threshold to check — magnesium not in our verified record
Ash not yet verified, no default available Not yet verifiedash no corpus anchor for ash yet

Calories & cost — for your 10-lb adult cat

Calorie density 375 kcal/cup3515 kcal/kg lighter than 78% of dry cat foods (median 415)
Daily serving¾ cups
Cost per day—
Bag lasts—

Cost per 1,000 kcal not available yet — this cat food isn't price-matched to a retail listing in our corpus yet. Serving math uses standard veterinary energy formulas — see the formula.

Standards & ingredients

AAFCO statement
what this means
Two kinds of AAFCO claims exist. Most foods are only "formulated to meet" nutrient profiles — a paper calculation. A smaller set carry the stronger claim: fed to real cats in AAFCO-procedure trials ("Animal feeding tests using AAFCO procedures substantiate…").
 Formulated to meet · maintenance
First five ingredients (by pre-cooking weight)Full ingredient list not yet verified
Named animal protein first; named meals onlyNot yet verified
Legumes in first 10 (FDA DCM inquiry)Not yet verified
BHA / BHT preservativesNot yet verified
Carrageenan (thickener)Not yet verified
Ethoxyquin
why unknown
When a fish-meal supplier adds ethoxyquin, U.S. rules don't require it on the finished label — so no label can prove its absence for recipes containing fish meal. We report this as a gap rather than guessing.
 Fish-meal content not confirmed

Safety

FDA recalls — Natural Balance, since 2023None on record
ManufacturerNot confirmed from label
Label transparency 9 of 15 standard fields
Green = verified favorable · amber = gap in the record · red = verified unfavorable · gray = not disclosed / neutral fact.
Source: official label source (official) · anchors: 283 verified dry cat foods · how to read this label

The fit

For your cat, specifically

Checked for a 10-lb adult cat with urinary health + a low-carb goal — the same published criteria our finder uses. Change your cat above and these update.

✓
Validated for adult catsAAFCO statement covers adult maintenance.
·
Urinary fit — can't assessMagnesium is not disclosed on this label, so the urinary/struvite check cannot be run — most cat food labels omit it entirely (only a small share of the cat foods we've verified disclose magnesium at all).
·
Fiber 5% DMNot selected as a concern for your cat — shown here for reference.
·
Sensitive stomachNot selected for your cat — but shown here for reference.
·
Chicken content not disclosedWe could not confirm whether chicken is in the ingredient list.
·
Low-carb fit — can't assessEstimated carbohydrate needs protein, fat, fiber and ash to compute, and at least one of those is not disclosed for this SKU.

The source material

The full ingredient list

Every flag on the Verified Label is computed from this list. Ingredients are ordered by pre-cooking weight — the first five carry the most information.

Full ingredient list not yet available for this SKU — only the fields verified above are shown. See the source for what's currently confirmed.

The maker

Who makes this — and how they back it up

The four questions the WSAVA nutrition guidelines tell you to ask a pet-food company. Every answer is sourced or marked as an undisclosed gap — never guessed. This is the "is it made competently?" axis that star-rating sites skip.

Owns its manufacturing Mixed

Company-owned plant (Brownwood, TX) AND external co-packers = mixed.

source →
Employs a qualified nutritionist Undisclosed

References a 'PhD small animal nutritionist' but names no individual and states no DACVN/ACVN credential; null per rule.

source →
AAFCO feeding trials Undisclosed

No feeding-trial AAFCO statement found on the 44 labels we’ve verified for this brand, and no company-wide claim was found either. Most pet foods are only "formulated to meet" AAFCO profiles (a paper calculation) rather than fed to real animals in trials — this is common, not necessarily a red flag.

Peer-reviewed research None found

A reproducible PubMed search (author-affiliation field, animal/pet-domain filtered) returns zero indexed papers for this brand name. Not proof no research exists — only that none is PubMed-indexed under this exact name.

source →
Parent company Ethos Pet Brands (co-owned by L Catterton and Nexus Capital Management) ↗ Founded 1989 ↗ Headquarters / plant Burbank, California, USA ↗ FDA recalls on record 1 on record

Full company scorecard, sources, and every SKU we've verified for this brand: Natural Balance brand page →