Buddy Wet Canned Pâté: Delightful Duck review

An Average placing needs its context. Wet food scores strongly as a category and its midpoint falls in our Excellent band, so a tin can be genuinely meaty and honest and still finish below that middle mark. Two things account for the distance here. The first is that heading: however fully the bracket explains it, a term that could legally cover any warm blooded animal counts for less on our reading than a species printed up front.

The second is the estimated carbohydrate, which runs from 5.8% of dry matter on the duck tin up to 26.3% on the lamb, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. That figure is worked out by difference and not measured, so on labels that declare protein and fat as minimums it reads high. With only 2% pea flour and 0.7% lignocellulose listed, there is very little starch in the tin for it to describe. Transparency reads Outstanding on every recipe, protein and processing reads Average across the six, and nutritional balance reads Outstanding on four of them with the lamb and the turkey and rabbit in Excellent.

Ingredients, as declared: 65% meat and animal derivatives (40% duck meat, 15% duck gizzard, 10% duck heart), 2% pea flour, 0.7% lignocellulose, 0.3% calcium carbonate, 0.1% dried kelp, 0.01% dried cranberries, 0.01% dried blueberries.

Category terms usually mean a recipe is asking to be taken on trust. Not this one. The bracket after the 65% accounts for the full amount. The lamb tin reads 35% lamb meat, 20% lamb intestine and 10% lamb heart, and the beef tin 25% beef with 20% trachea and 20% heart. You are told which animal, which parts and how much of each, which is far more than the phrase normally delivers.

Those organ entries are the ones doing the work, and they are not filler. A carcass keeps much of its iron, its B vitamins and its taurine in the organs, and heart in particular behaves more like muscle meat than like anything the word derivatives brings to mind. A dog on this range eats a nose to tail bowl by design.

The plant list is almost an afterthought, which is the point of a pâté like this. Pea flour at 2% binds, lignocellulose at 0.7% adds bulk without calories, calcium carbonate at 0.3% tops up the calcium and dried kelp at 0.1% brings iodine and trace minerals. Cranberries and blueberries appear at 0.01% each, a garnish on the label.

No oil is added anywhere in the range, so every gram of fat arrives inside the meat. That shows in the analysis. Fat converts to 25.0% of dry matter on four of the tins and 36.4% on the duck, the richest of the six, while protein lands between 36.4% and 43.2% of dry matter. For a wet food those are strong numbers, and they come from the animal content itself.

The added panel is short and every entry carries a figure, running through vitamins A, D3, E and B1, biotin, zinc, iron, manganese and potassium iodide. Turkey & Rabbit is the outlier, printing no vitamin A, twice the zinc at 20 mg per kilo and a higher dose of B1 than any of the others. That is worth noticing if you are comparing the tins line by line. The panel also reads as a translation from Scandinavian labelling, with international units written as IE on most tins and IU on the rest.

Duck meat at 40% with gizzard at 15% and heart at 10%, the meatiest split in the range. This is the richest tin by some way, with fat at 36.4% of dry matter and protein at 43.2%. It also carries the most energy of the six, an estimated 106 kcal per 100g, so portions run smallest here at about 794 grams a day for a 15kg dog.

£9.07 a kilo, in one 400g tin sold singly and in packs of 6.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £7.20 and £8.08 a day depending on the tin. That comes to roughly 794 to 891 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).