Canagan Adult Tins: Beef Stew review

A typical adult wet tin already reaches our Excellent band, which tells you how well the category does in our scoring. Canagan puts nine of its twelve recipes on that same rung and lifts three above it, with most finishing above the middle of the category. The spread between the best and the least is small, so the real decision is the animal that suits your dog.

Protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency read Outstanding throughout, with the Country Game and Salmon & Herring tins carrying almost no carbohydrate at all.

Ingredients, as declared: Freshly Prepared Beef (65%), Sweet Potato, Carrots, Peas, Broccoli, Minerals, Green Lipped Mussel*, Salmon Oil, Apple, Spinach, Seaweed, Parsley, Yucca, Rosehips, Nettle, Marigold, Slippery Elm, Aniseed, Peppermint, Rosemary. *Source of Glucosamine (100 mg/kg).

The construction is the same tin to tin. Freshly prepared meat is declared at 65% on the adult recipes and 60% on Senior Feast, and the analysis follows it. Protein converts to between 40.8% and 51.5% of dry matter depending on which animal is in the tin. That is a strong showing for wet food, and it holds across the whole range.

Sweet potato leads the plant side, usually with carrots, peas and broccoli behind it, and Free-run Chicken swaps those for a prebiotic pairing of chicory and banana. There is no cereal on any of the twelve labels, and the estimated carbohydrate runs from 0.5% to 14.8% of dry matter, every one of them under the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. Those carbohydrate figures are estimates, arrived at by difference. The method reads generously on wet recipes. The true numbers are likely to be lower still.

Then comes the long tail: apple, spinach, seaweed, parsley, yucca, rosehips, nettle, marigold, slippery elm, aniseed, peppermint and rosemary. Not one of those has a figure beside it, and everything there is at trace level. Read the tail as the maker's signature. The meat percentages are the part of the label doing the heavy lifting.

Every label carries green lipped mussel, and on the adult tins it is marked as the source of glucosamine at 100 mg/kg. That is a friendly nod to ageing joints, well under a therapeutic dose. Senior Feast is the exception. It prints glucosamine and chondroitin figures of its own well above that 100 mg/kg mark, and adds milk thistle and cranberry. If a joint problem has been diagnosed, keep to whatever the vet has dosed and let this be the dinner underneath.

The added panel is short and printed with figures beside each entry: vitamin D3 at 200 IU per kilo, zinc at 25 mg, manganese at 1.4 mg and iodine at 0.75 mg. Copper joins at 1 mg on most tins, and vitamin A on a few. Salmon oil is on every list, always without a percentage. The label never says how much marine omega-3 a tin carries.

Freshly prepared beef at 65%, the only tin in the range built on beef alone. It is also one of the richest, with fat converting to 31.2% of dry matter and energy estimated at 117 kcal per 100g, so portions run smaller here than on the poultry tins.

Most of the range is £7.97 a kilo, with Country Game and Turkey & Duck Dinner at £10.72. Every recipe comes in a 400g tin. Singles and packs of 6 are both available.

Daily feeding for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition lands between £5.69 and £10.62 depending on which tin you buy, or somewhere from 714 to 1010 grams. That is on a maintenance figure of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75). The lighter tins fill the bowl more for the same energy, which is why the grams and the daily figure do not move in step.