Alpha Spirit Complete Wet Pouch: Chicken Pate review

The five pouches all land in our Excellent band, close enough together that the animal, not the ranking, is what to choose on. That is also where the typical adult wet food lands, and wet is a category that scores well for us, so these are sitting comfortably among the better pouches rather than propping the shelf up. Protein and processing and transparency both read Excellent right across the range, and nutritional balance goes a band better at Outstanding on four of the five.

The one thing the labels hold back is moisture. None of the five declares it, so the dry-matter conversions here use our standard 78% assumption for wet food. The ham pouch leaves out ash as well, which puts a dry-matter reading out of reach for that one entirely. That is common enough on a pate label and it changes nothing about the food, but it does mean the dry-matter column is an estimate rather than a measurement.

Ingredients, as declared: 95% chicken (65% meat, liver, heart), gelatin, pumpkin, brewer's yeast, cassava shidigera.

Ninety-five per cent of each pouch is the named animal. On the chicken, turkey and ham recipes the label goes further and gives you the split: 65% muscle meat with liver and heart behind it, or lung and liver on the ham. Seeing the organs named is welcome. Nothing on an animal is more nutrient-dense, and the organs do a lot of the micronutrition in these pouches on their own.

The rest of the list runs to four entries. Gelatin sets the pate and pumpkin adds a little gentle fibre. Brewer's yeast brings a full spread of B vitamins along with useful protein. Yucca shidigera closes the list, an extract used to soften stool odour. Nothing there is filler and nothing there is unnamed except the gelatin.

Protein converts to between 43.2% and 50.0% of dry matter on the four pouches we can convert, with fat running between 25.0% and 36.4%. The chicken and turkey recipes are the richest of them and the sea bream is the leanest, which gives you a useful choice depending on whether your dog needs feeding up or steadying.

Calcium converts to 1.05% of dry matter on the chicken, turkey, ham and sea bream pouches, a comfortable level for an adult dog that also stays within the tighter ceiling a large-breed puppy needs.

The added panel is generous and printed in full: vitamin A at 5397 IU/kg, vitamin D3 at 345 and vitamin E at 108. Then come manganese, iron, copper, zinc and iodine, each with a figure beside it. That is a good deal more declaration than most wet labels bother with.

Chicken at 95%, broken out as 65% meat with liver and heart. It shares the richest analysis in the range with the turkey pouch at 36.4% fat on a dry-matter basis, and it is one of the two labels printing cassava shidigera in place of yucca.

£7.50 a kilo across all five pates. The pouches come in 85 g and 300 g sizes, and you can buy them singly or in packs of 24 and 12.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat between about 771 and 868 grams a day, working out at £5.78 to £6.51 depending on the pouch. The basis is around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). No pouch prints an energy figure, so 97 to 109 kcal per 100g is our own estimate.