Edgard & Cooper Adult Tins: Game & Duck review

Four of the five tins earn our Excellent band, with the Game & Duck a shade behind in Good. The gaps are small, so choose on the protein your dog does best with. Because wet recipes generally score well with us, an Excellent is the going rate on this shelf, so the interesting question is what separates these tins from the middle of it. Three answers: 60% named meat on every label, an estimated carbohydrate share that mostly runs under the wet average, and an energy density above it. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding on every one of the five.

Ingredients, as declared: game 35%, duck 25%, sweet potato 2%, beetroot (dried) 0.5%, minerals, mannan-oligosaccharides (MOS), linseed oil, fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS), apple (dried) 0.13%, pear (dried) 0.05%, blueberries (dried) 0.05%, dried fennel 0.01%, dried caraway 0.01%, dried yarrow 0.01%, dried blackberry leaves 0.01%, dried mistle 0.01%, dried chamomile blossoms 0.01%, dried gentianroot 0.01%, dried centaury 0.01%

Meat opens every tin at 60%, and where two animals share the recipe both figures are printed. Protein converts to 50.0% of dry matter on four of the five and 45.5% on the Salmon & Turkey, which is a strong reading for food that comes out of a tin.

The plant side is deliberately thin. Carrot at 2% or sweet potato at 2% is the biggest entry, with dried broccoli, beetroot, apple, pear, blueberries and the rest printed in fractions of a per cent. Estimated carbohydrate lands between 4.1% and 15.4% of dry matter across the range against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food, so the starch really is incidental here.

The prebiotic pair is MOS and FOS, one drawn from yeast cell walls and one from plants. Neither feeds the dog directly. What they feed is the gut bacteria in the large intestine. Linseed oil carries the omega-3 on four of the recipes, with salmon oil added on the Chicken & Turkey and the Lamb & Beef. The Salmon & Turkey tin takes a different route and adds no oil at all, leaning on the fish itself.

Every entry in the additive panel is dosed: vitamin E at 30 mg, zinc at 20 mg, copper at 2.3 mg, manganese at 2 mg and iodine at 0.5 mg. Vitamin D3 at 140 IU joins on four of the tins. A short panel is not a thin one when the meat is doing this much of the work.

Each list ends with a run of dried botanicals at 0.01% apiece, from fennel and caraway through to chamomile and on to gentian root and centaury. They are the brand's herbal signature and nothing in the bowl depends on them.

Game at 35% with duck at 25%, built on sweet potato rather than carrot. Ash is the highest in the range here at 2.5% and estimated carbohydrate the lowest at 4.1% of dry matter. Game is a category term, so this is the tin for a dog after a change of meat, and not the one for a strict avoidance list.

Three of the tins are £6.87 a kilo and the Game & Duck and Salmon & Turkey are £7.33 a kilo. Tins come in 400 g and 800 g, singly or by the six, with those two recipes offered in the 400 g size only.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £5.39 and £5.98 a day depending on the recipe. The sum assumes about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is roughly 785 to 816 grams, or about two of the 400 g tins. The label's own guide for a 15kg dog is 800 grams a day.