Akela Wet Working Dog Food: Fish Feast review

Four of the five recipes reach our Outstanding band and Fish Feast settles a step below them in our Excellent band, so the range holds together closely whichever animal you pick. Wet food scores well for us as a category, and the typical adult wet food is an Excellent-band food itself. Most of this range sits a step above the middle of a strong shelf, with Fish Feast level with it. Protein and processing reads Excellent on Original Meat & Fish and on Spring Lamb, and Outstanding on the other three.

Estimated carbohydrate lands between 18.0% and 21.6% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%, and that is the estimate doing its job rather than starch hiding in the can. Carbohydrate on a wet label is worked out by taking everything the analysis does measure away from the total, so the herbs, berries, seaweed and coconut all end up counted in that column.

Ingredients, as declared: Freshly Prepared Salmon 25%, Freshly Prepared Herring 25%, Freshly Prepared Prawn/Shrimp 15%, Sweet Potato 5%, Minerals, Cranberries, Asparagus, Carrots, Green Beans, Blueberries, Green-Lipped Mussel (Source of Glucosamine & Chondroitin), Coconut, Seaweed, Valerian, Camomile, Marjoram, Stinging Nettle, Watercress, Basil, Sage, Dill, Green Tea, Aloe Vera, Rosehips, Borage Oil, Prebiotic FOS.

The meat is the whole point here. Kangaroo, Spring Lamb and Wild Game each declare 70% freshly prepared animal. Original Meat & Fish spreads the same 70% across chicken, turkey, salmon and herring, and Fish Feast reaches 65% with salmon, herring and prawn. Protein converts to between 42.0% and 43.6% of dry matter. The meat-led billing on the front of the tin holds up in the analysis.

Spring Lamb is the label that opens the animal right up, listing hearts, meat, lung, liver and tripe by name. Organ meat is where a great deal of a wet food's natural vitamins and minerals actually come from, and it is part of why the added panel on these cans can stay so short.

There is almost no starch behind the meat. Only Fish Feast carries a starch ingredient at all, sweet potato at 5%, and everything else on the plant side is cranberries, blueberries, asparagus, carrots, green beans and coconut at modest levels.

Joint support is handled two ways across the range. Kangaroo and Wild Game print glucosamine and chondroitin at 100 mg/kg each. Fish Feast, Original Meat & Fish and Spring Lamb use green-lipped mussel, which carries both naturally but arrives without a figure on the label. A dog already on a joint programme from their vet should stay on it, with any of these as the dinner underneath.

Then comes the long herbal finish that runs across all five labels. It reads valerian, camomile, marjoram, stinging nettle, watercress, basil, sage, dill, green tea, aloe vera and rosehips, with borage oil and prebiotic FOS closing the list. Borage oil brings gamma-linolenic acid, and the FOS is food for the friendly bacteria living in the gut. It all sits at trace level. That is not what you are buying the food for.

The added panel is deliberately brief on four of the labels: vitamin D3 at 200 IU/kg, with zinc and manganese each dosed beside it, and iodine as well. Spring Lamb prints no such panel at all, which is a fair question to put to Akela if you like to see one. Fish Feast is also the only label to mention added taurine, and it ties that to the smaller tin rather than to every pack.

Salmon and herring at 25% each with prawn at 15%, the only recipe in the range to reach for shellfish and the only one carrying a starch ingredient, sweet potato at 5%. It is also the single label that mentions added taurine.

Fish Feast is £8.75 a kilo. Kangaroo, Original Meat & Fish, Spring Lamb and Wild Game are sold as 400g cans.

As a guide, Fish Feast works out at £6.33 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, which is roughly 724 grams. That is on about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. These are unusually energy-dense cans for wet food at 116 to 119 kcal per 100g against the 97 kcal typical of adult wet food, so daily portions run smaller than the shelf around them.