Denes Adult Chicken With Vegetables Tins review

Our scoring puts this tin in the Good band. Wet food does well on our system generally, and the typical adult wet food sits a band above in Excellent. This tin holds its own in a strong field without leading it. The meat is why it gets there. Fresh chicken at 38% and chicken liver at 8% come to 46% of the tin between them, all one animal and all carrying a figure. The rice is what holds it back. It carries no percentage against it and pushes estimated carbohydrate to 25.0% of dry matter, where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. Nutritional balance reads Excellent and transparency Outstanding, with protein and processing at Average.

Ingredients, as declared: Fresh chicken 38%, chicken liver 8%, rice, vegetables 4% (carrot, green beans, white potato), minerals, herbs (garlic, parsley, kelp).

The list opens with fresh chicken at 38%, and chicken liver at 8% comes next. That is a proper amount of liver. Liver is dense in vitamin A, B vitamins, copper and iron, and it is about as palatable as anything a maker can put in a can, so it earns its place twice over. Because both entries come from the same bird, the tin is genuinely built on one animal, and protein converts to 36.4% of dry matter.

Rice comes third and carries no percentage, so its share is the one number the label withholds. What we can see is the result in the analysis: the estimated carbohydrate converts to 25.0% of dry matter, which is above the 15.8% the typical adult wet food runs at. Rice sits easily on most dogs' digestion, so this is a question of proportion.

The vegetables are the part of this label that deserves credit. The tin declares vegetables at 4% and then itemises them as carrot, green beans and white potato. Beta carotene and soluble fibre come from the carrot, the beans add a little more fibre, and the white potato is a starch doing much the same job as the rice. Naming all three is more than most tins at this end of the shelf bother with.

The herbs are named too, as garlic, parsley and kelp. Kelp is a useful natural source of iodine and trace minerals, parsley is largely there for flavour, and garlic appears in the small culinary amounts that have long been a signature of this brand's recipes. Plenty of owners are perfectly happy with that, and some prefer to avoid it altogether. Either way it is worth knowing.

The added panel is the most detailed part of the label. Vitamins A, D3 and E each carry a figure, and so do zinc, iron, copper, manganese, calcium iodate and selenium, right down to a fraction of a milligram per kilo. A tin that prints its trace elements in that much detail is telling you it has nothing to hide.

Sold in 400g cans, singly or by the case of 12.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, our estimate puts the daily amount at around 935 grams, or a little over two cans a day. That works from a maintenance need of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard estimate) against our estimated energy figure of 90 kcal per 100g.

The feeding table printed on the tin does not read sensibly as captured, so the estimate above is the more useful of the two.