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Dry Matter Basis is the wetness of the food, or how much of it is water. If you take two identical dog foods with the exact same ingredients but the DMB is 15% in one and 23% in the other, it means one has 8% more water than dry food. Dry dog food is packaged and sold by weight. If they can introduce more water in the dry kibble, they can package more boxes/bags from the same dry weight of kibble. My vet said 0-20% DMB is acceptable as all dry kibble must have some moisture in it. Over that amount and you have food where extra water was introduced for whatever reasons.
It's similar to the dry weight ingredient proposal to require pet food to list the ingredients based on the DRY weight instead of the whole weight. This way they can't take water laden frozen chicken and list it as the first ingredient based on weight when after the water is evaporated the actual weight of the chicken is below even the corn husk flakes. In the case of the DMB, it shows how much water they left in to increase weight while reducing the equivalent food product.
I checked back in the Whole Dog Journal issues from 2014 and 2013 where they rate dry dog foods and found no mention of Calorie Weighted Basis and they tend to do a rather thorough job on this special issue each year.
I'd contact the manufacturer and ask them to explain it. (and if ya find out would you let us know)
Maybe the calorie weighted basis has to do with the percentage of calories from fat (which is listed on human food as a number, not a percentage. A human label I'm looking at says a serving has 110 calories, and it has 30 calories from fat. It lists the total fat as 3 grams. Actually, I've read that a gram of fat has 9 calories so there must be some rounding involved here.) Anyway, my guess is that a 3rd of the dog food's calories come from fat in this case.
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