Bonacibo Adult Can: Beef review

All three tins sit in our Average band, two bands beneath the typical adult wet food, which lands up in our Excellent band. The distance is worth explaining, because it is not what the analysis alone would suggest. On dry matter the panel is respectable: protein between 40.0% and 45.0%, fat between 25.0% and 27.5%, estimated carbohydrate between 10.5% and 18.0% against the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. What the score responds to is the label. When the animal content is a category term with 4% named, and the grain and the vegetables are category terms too, there is very little for a scoring system to reward. That shows in the pillars, where protein and processing reads Poor on all three tins while the respectable panel carries nutritional balance to Outstanding across the range, and one band covers the lot. None of that is a safety verdict; it is a description of how much this label chooses to show.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (46%, including minimum 4% Beef), Cereals, Derivatives of vegetable origin, Minerals.

Meat and animal derivatives is a legal category term covering the fleshy parts and processing derivatives of any warm blooded land animal. It says nothing about which animals or which parts, and it can be made up differently from one batch to the next. Here it sits at 46% on the beef and lamb tins and 42% on the salmon, with only 4% pinned to the species on the front of the can.

Cereals and derivatives of vegetable origin work the same way. Both are broad enough to cover very good ingredients and very ordinary ones, and the label gives no way to tell which is in the tin. Worth saying plainly: the estimated carbohydrate does not read like a grain heavy recipe. It lands at 18.0% of dry matter on the beef and 10.5% on the other two, against the 15.8% typical of adult wet food.

What the analysis can tell you it tells clearly. Protein converts to 40.0% of dry matter on the beef and 45.0% on the lamb and salmon, fat to 25.0% and 27.5%, and moisture is declared at 80% across all three. Ash at 14.0% of dry matter is on the high side, which usually points to a good deal of mineral and bone material in the mix.

The added panel is short. Vitamins A, D3 and E are each printed per kilo, and then there is a line that reads only as pentahydrate, which leaves that trace element unnamed on the label as captured. Calories are not declared either, so the energy figures shown on this page are our own estimate from the analysis.

Taken as a whole, this is an ordinary European tin of the sort that has fed a great many dogs perfectly well. Choosing it means trusting the maker's recipe rather than reading it, because reading it is not on offer here.

Beef is named at a minimum of 4% inside a 46% block of meat and animal derivatives. This is the lightest of the three at an estimated 83 kcal per 100g, and the one where estimated carbohydrate runs highest, at 18.0% of dry matter.

Sold in one 400 g can size across the beef, lamb and salmon flavours.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at roughly 1011 grams of the beef tin and 981 grams of the lamb or the salmon. That is two and a half cans. The label's own guide for a dog of 12 to 25 kg is 800 to 1200 grams a day.