Black Hawk

About this brand

Masterpet/EBOS-owned, AU-made at the Parkes NSW Pet Care Kitchen across both dry and wet (cans, trays, and pouches). Tagline 'every ingredient matters' anchors a no-wheat, no-corn, no-soy claim on the original range.

The food

Obligate carnivore lens

The Original Adult Chicken leads with Chicken Meal, and rice, oats, peas, chickpeas and faba beans follow; the current label carries no unspecified 'Vegetable Protein' term, correcting earlier copy on this site. The Grain-Free Chicken & Kangaroo swaps rice and oats for tapioca and sweet potato and adds kangaroo and duck meal, but keeps the same legume stack as the grain-inclusive recipe, so it changes the grain content rather than the legume content. Neither variant passes the strict lens cleanly.

Pragmatic lens

A coherent AU-made kibble with named animal leads and no synthetic preservatives, colours or flavours; the main pragmatic consideration is the legume load shared by both grain-inclusive and grain-free recipes, not a difference between them.

Recommendation

A reasonable AU-made mid-premium kibble for a healthy adult cat in households that want named animal proteins and no synthetic additives. The Original recipe suits grain-tolerant cats; the grain-free variant makes sense for households avoiding wheat, corn and rice specifically, though it carries the same legume load as the rest of the range.

Distinctive ingredients

Peas, Chickpeas and Faba Beans. The shared legume base across all seven kibble recipes, present in identical form whether the recipe is grain-inclusive or grain-free. These are whole legumes providing starch, fibre and some plant protein, not the refined isolates (pea protein, faba bean protein) that show up separately elsewhere in the range. Grain-free at Black Hawk means less grain, not less legume.

Pea Protein. A refined plant protein isolate used to lift protein content, present in all six wet pouches but none of the seven kibble recipes. It sits in the Plant Protein consideration category, distinct from the whole peas in the legume base.

Gelling Agents. Present in all six wet pouches, where the job is to set the gravy or jelly texture around the meat pieces rather than add nutrition. They fall under Thickeners & Gums in this site's consideration system, the same category as guar gum or carrageenan on other brands, even though 'gelling agents' is a collective rather than a named term.

Faba Bean Protein. Appears only in Original Adult Ocean Fish, alongside the whole faba beans already in the shared legume base. Unlike the whole legume, this is an isolate, so Ocean Fish carries both the standard legume stack and an added plant protein concentrate not found in the other six kibble recipes.

Plant Cellulose and Psyllium. The fibre sources behind the Healthy Benefits naming. Plant cellulose appears in all four Healthy Benefits recipes; psyllium is added on top in Indoor and Hairball specifically. Both are insoluble fibres that add bulk without much fermentable content, a common approach for hairball and weight formulas.

The claims, checked

The numbers in practice

Crude fibre steps up across the Healthy Benefits kibble line in a way that lines up with its functional naming: Indoor sits at 5.5 percent, Hairball at 7.5 percent and Weight Management at 8.5 percent, against 3.5 to 4.5 percent on the Original range. Weight Management also carries the lowest energy density of the seven kibbles at 3,585 kcal/kg, versus 4,120 kcal/kg for Original Kitten Chicken at the other end. All seven kibbles publish 10 percent moisture, so dry-matter protein across the range runs a tight 35.6 to 38.9 percent.

The six wet pouches publish moisture from 75 to 80 percent and convert to a noticeably higher dry-matter protein range, 42.0 to 50.0 percent, than the kibble side. That gap is typical of pouch versus kibble processing rather than a Black Hawk-specific feature; less heat and no extrusion generally leaves more protein per dry gram in a wet format. Energy density across the pouches runs 910 to 1,250 kcal/kg as-fed, reflecting the added water weight rather than a real difference in nutrient concentration.

Common questions

Most common first ingredients: chicken meal, chicken, fish meal

No products in this range trigger synthetic preservatives, synthetic colours, synthetic flavours, added sugars, caramel colour, animal digest.