Calibra Dog Premium Line Beef 12x1240g review

Our Average placing here is a labelling story more than a nutrition one. Protein and processing reads Poor against an ingredient list written almost entirely in category terms, with beef the only entry given a percentage of its own, while nutritional balance reads Excellent and transparency Good. The estimated carbohydrate adds to it, converting to 28.2% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%.

Set that typical wet food beside this tin and the distance looks large, since our scoring places it in the Excellent band. None of that is a safety verdict. Tins built like this have fed dogs happily for decades, and what the score reflects is how much the maker chooses to show you.

Ingredients, as declared: meat and animal derivatives (68 % in chunks*, of which 8 % beef), cereals, vegetable protein extracts, minerals, various sugars. *Chunks typically ± 50 % in finished product

The working list is short and most of it is legal shorthand. Meat and animal derivatives can cover any part of any warm blooded land animal, in any proportion, and it can be excellent material or ordinary material without the wording changing. What is fixed is the beef at 8%, which is the one animal figure you can hold the maker to.

Cereals and vegetable protein extracts do the rest of the heavy lifting. Neither term says what it is, and the vegetable protein extract matters most. Protein reads 7.0% as fed, which converts to 37.8% of dry matter and looks respectable on paper. Some of that total is plant protein, though, and dogs make less of plant protein than they do of meat protein.

Various sugars are on the list too. Sugar goes into food because dogs enjoy it, and seeing it declared on a wet label is uncommon enough to be worth a mention. It is not a reason to worry about a dog that is thriving, though it is one of the things a scoring system notices.

Every entry in the short added panel carries a dose: vitamin A, vitamin D3 and vitamin E, with copper, zinc, manganese and iodine behind them. No calcium figure is declared anywhere on the label, so there is nothing to read on that front. Fat sits at 3.8% as fed, converting to 20.5% of dry matter, which is moderate for a wet food and easy going for a dog that finds richer tins too much.

£1.95 a kilo, in 1240g tins, sold in cases of 12.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 1120 grams a day, which works out at about £2.18. The basis is roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The energy behind that sum is our own estimate at 75 kcal per 100g, since the label prints none, and the light energy density is why the daily amount looks so large.