Benevo Duo review

Average is where this tin lands, two bands below the Excellent that most adult wet food occupies. The gap is no mystery: our scoring rewards named animal content, and there is none here by design, so a plant recipe starts from behind whatever else it does well.

What it does earn is a clear list, with every ingredient named except the oil, and a fibre and protein reading that stands up honestly for a plant food. Nutritional balance and transparency both come back Good, with protein and processing reading Poor because there is no meat to read. If you are feeding this way as a matter of principle, that is a solid result rather than a compromise, and the tin is doing something most of the shelf does not even attempt.

Ingredients, as declared: Sweet Potato, Carrots, Oat Groats, Vegetable Oil, Brown Rice, Peas, Tomatoes, Blueberries, Cranberries, Brewers Yeast, Dried Kelp.

First on the list are sweet potato and carrots. That tells you at once what the body of the tin is. Carrots are an excellent source of vitamin A along with soluble fibre and antioxidants, and once cooked both are easily digested. Between them and the grains, carbohydrate converts to an estimated 41.7% of dry matter, well above the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. That is what a wet recipe built without meat comes to.

Oat groats and brown rice follow in their whole forms rather than as flours, bringing fibre and a spread of micronutrients, and peas add both protein and antioxidants. Whole peas are a far better thing to see on a label than refined pea protein, and here they sit well down the list, which is where they belong. Protein finishes at 29.2% of dry matter, a creditable figure for a recipe with no meat in it.

Vegetable oil is the one place the label stops being specific. Any oil of plant origin fits the term, usually the plainer ones. The source can change between batches with the label staying the same. Everything else here is named outright, which makes the one general term stand out. Fat converts to 8.3% of dry matter, so this is a lean tin however you read it.

Tomatoes, blueberries and cranberries do the antioxidant work at the end of the list, cranberries in particular being a long-standing addition for urinary tract health. Dried kelp brings iodine and a broad range of minerals. Brewers yeast adds B vitamins and a savoury note that helps a plant recipe smell like dinner.

The added panel is where a plant food has to work hardest, and this one is thorough. Taurine at 1,250 mg is the headline, an amino acid that dogs make for themselves but cats cannot, so the dose reflects the dual purpose of the tin. Vitamin A at 6,610 IU and vitamin D3 at 397 IU cover the fat-soluble vitamins a meat-free bowl would otherwise be short of. Iron, zinc, copper and manganese each appear twice over, once as a sulphate and once in chelated form, the second being generally the better absorbed. Calcium is not named in the panel, which is worth a look at the tin in front of you if you are counting minerals closely.

£9.86 a kilo, in a 354g tin sold on its own or by the case of 12.

Working from 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a day comes to about 1098 grams, or £10.83. The label's own guide is a good deal lighter, at 354 grams a day for a 9kg dog and 708 grams for an 18kg dog.