Alpha Spirit Imperial Wet Sausage Iberian Pork review

This lands in our Excellent band, and it gets there on the shortest ingredient list anywhere in this part of the shelf. Protein and processing reads Excellent while nutritional balance and transparency both read Outstanding. That is what happens when 96% of a recipe is one named fresh meat: protein converts to 46.5% of dry matter and fat to 34.5%.

Wet food scores well for us as a category, so an Excellent-band placement here means holding a good position among tins, trays and pouches that mostly do well themselves. What sets this one apart is density. At 160 kcal per 100g against the 97 typical of adult wet food, it does more with less. Estimated carbohydrate of 4.8% of dry matter is a fraction of the 15.8% the category usually runs to.

Ingredients, as declared: 96% Fresh Pork, Beet Fibre, Collagen.

Three ingredients, and the first of them is 96% of the food. Fresh pork means exactly that, meat that has not been rendered or dried before it went in, and at that share there is very little room left for anything else to be doing the work.

Beet fibre is the second entry and it is there for gut transit rather than for nutrition. Collagen is the third, the protein that gives the sausage its structure and its bite. Collagen is animal-derived and its species is not stated, which is the one loose thread on an otherwise fully named list.

The analysis is the strongest part of the whole thing. Protein at 46.5% of dry matter and fat at 34.5% describe a dense, rich food. Moisture at 69.0% is low for a wet recipe, and that is why the energy figure runs so far ahead of the category. Calcium converts to 0.61% of dry matter, a sensible level for an adult dog.

The added panel is long and every entry on it carries a dose. Vitamin A is at 7954 IU/kg, vitamin D3 at 509 and vitamin E at 159. Manganese, iron, copper, zinc and iodine are each printed in milligrams beside them. For a recipe with this few ingredients, that panel is doing the micronutrition properly.

£17.11 a kilo. It comes as a 150 g or 350 g sausage, and in packs of four 65 g sausages.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 525 grams a day, working out at £8.99, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Because the sausage carries 160 kcal per 100g, that daily weight sits well below what a standard wet tin would need.