Burns Wet Food: Hearty Lamb with Carrots & Brown Rice review

A Good placing here is a comment on construction and nothing more. Wet is a strong field on our scoring and its midpoint falls in our Excellent band, which is a high bar, and Burns has built against that grain deliberately for years. The meat sits at a quarter to a little over a quarter of the tin, with carrots and brown rice taking up much of the rest. Protein lands between 24.3% and 27.4% of dry matter, and the wet foods finishing above this range run higher.

The same construction pushes the estimated carbohydrate up, to between 42.6% and 55.7% of dry matter. That figure is arrived at by difference, with nothing measured. A tin holding a quarter of its weight in carrots reads higher than the starch alone would justify, since cooked carrot is mostly water and fibre. Where the range does best is on what it tells you: every ingredient that matters carries a number, and every label in the range reads Outstanding on our transparency pillar.

Ingredients, as declared: Lamb (26%), Carrots (25%), Brown Rice (13%), Minerals. As a natural product, the consistency of Burns Wet Food Range may change from time to time.

The meat is named, sourced and quantified on every label, at 27.5% in the free range chicken recipe and 26% in the other three. Chicken, lamb and turkey each stand alone in their tin with no second animal behind them, which is unusual at this level of the market and genuinely useful if you are steering around one protein.

Carrots at 25% are the surprise on the list, and they are the reason these tins look and smell the way they do. Cooked carrot brings vitamin A, soluble fibre and antioxidants, and it digests easily. It is also mostly water and fibre, so a quarter of the tin given over to it is a quarter not given over to meat. That trade is the whole character of this range.

Brown rice at 13% is the starch, kept whole rather than refined, and it is the calm, familiar carrier a gentle recipe reaches for. It is also the entry that rules the range out for a grain-free household, and Burns makes no attempt to disguise it.

Only the wild fish recipe adds oils: salmon oil at 1%, then sunflower oil behind the minerals. Salmon oil brings the long chain omega-3 a fish recipe is usually chosen for, and sunflower oil is among the kinder plant oils, rich in vitamin E. Even with both, this is the leanest tin of the four at 8.7% fat on a dry matter basis.

The added panel deserves credit. Vitamins A, D3 and E are dosed in print, and the trace elements are chelated rather than supplied as plain salts. The selenium comes as selenised yeast, the more bioavailable of the two forms pet food may use and the less common choice. One caveat comes with the chelates: the protein hydrolysates they bind to have no named source. On a strict avoidance list that matters.

Lamb at 26% behind the same carrots and brown rice. It is the lowest in protein of the four at 24.3% of dry matter and the highest in estimated carbohydrate at 52.6%. At an estimated 92 kcal per 100g, a 15kg dog would eat about 908 grams a day. For a dog bored with poultry, lamb is a useful change of animal.

£5.06 a kilo across all four recipes, in 150g and 395g tins, sold as 12 x 150g and as 6 or 16 x 395g.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £3.70 and £5.07 a day depending on the recipe, or roughly 731 to 1002 grams. Those figures work off about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).