Earls Pouches in Jelly: Beef review

Our reading puts all four pouches in our Average band. Nutritional balance answers to the analysis and reads Outstanding on all four, with value Average across the range. Protein and processing answers to the label: Average on the beef, the lamb and the chicken, and Poor on the poultry. One thing drives it. A label written almost entirely in category terms, from the meat to the oils to the vegetable derivative, leaves our scoring barely anything to reward, and the declared sugars pull on it too. Set against the Excellent band a typical adult wet food reaches, that is two bands down, though the distance is about disclosure and construction and not about safety. Pouches like these have fed dogs perfectly happily for decades, and if yours is one of them, this is information rather than a reason to change.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives 40% (Including 4% Beef), Minerals, Oils and Fats, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin (0.07% Fructo-Oligosaccharide from Chicory RootS), Various Sugars.

The working list is five entries long and most of it is written in legal category terms. Meat and animal derivatives at 40% can mean any warm-blooded land animal in any proportion, and the only fixed point inside it is the 4% that gets named. Oils and fats can be any oil from any plant or animal, and derivatives of vegetable origin covers a similarly wide field. None of that is a hygiene concern, and cartons written this way are common at this end of the shelf. You take this recipe on trust. The label does not let you read it.

One entry inside the vagueness is named and counted, fructo-oligosaccharide from chicory root at 0.07%. It is a prebiotic, and the large intestine's own bacteria live on it. The dose is small, and it was put there on purpose.

Various sugars sit on all four lists. Sugar is added to wet food for palatability and to help a jelly behave like a jelly, and no figure is printed beside it, so the amount is unknown. Worth knowing if you keep a close eye on what goes into a dog who runs hot or carries a little too much weight.

The analysis tells you what it can. Protein is 9.0% as fed on the beef, converting to 47.4% of dry matter, and 7.5% on the other three, converting to 41.7%. Fat converts to between 26.3% and 27.8%, and carbohydrate to an estimated 13.2% and 16.6% of dry matter, which sits either side of the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. At 83 kcal per 100g these are light pouches, so daily portions run large.

The added panel is short and each entry is dosed: vitamin D3 at 140 iu, vitamin E at 12 mg, zinc at 12 mg and iodine at 0.3 mg, identical across the four flavours.

Beef at 4% is the named animal, and this pouch carries the strongest analysis in the range, with protein at 9.0% as fed and 47.4% of dry matter and the lowest carbohydrate estimate at 13.2%. It is also the driest of the four at 81.0% moisture.

£2.49 a kilo, sold as a 100 g pouch in a carton of 12.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to about £2.52 a day, or roughly 1012 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is a shade over ten pouches, so a household with a large dog will get through a carton quickly.