Essential Foods Essential Kingdom Living Pate review

Our Excellent band is where this tin finishes, and it earns the placing with a genuinely meat-led list rather than with marketing. The typical adult wet food carries an Excellent band word of its own, so this is a strong shelf to be measured against. Read honestly, the tin sits right in the middle of it. Protein and processing comes back Excellent, with nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding and value reading Excellent too, the signature of a recipe that puts its effort into what goes in the tin.

Ingredients, as declared: Wild boar meat (26%), pork hearts (20%), pork trachea (19%), pea flour (2%), cranberry (1%), blueberry (1%), goji berry (1%), blackberry (1%), lignocellulose, calcium carbonate, kelp (0.2%), green tea (0.2%), marigold (0.2%), ginger (0.2%), spirulina (0.2%).

The animal share is the whole story here. Wild boar meat at 26%, pork hearts at 20% and pork trachea at 19% add up to 65% of the tin. Each of the three carries its own percentage, and no category term is used. Protein converts to 40.9% of dry matter and fat to 31.8%, a rich and unmistakably meat-forward analysis for something served from a tin.

Hearts and trachea are working ingredients, not makeweights. Heart is dense muscle meat and naturally taurine-rich, while trachea is cartilage, which is where the small natural supply of glucosamine in any meat-based food comes from. Neither reads glamorously on a label, and both are close to what a dog would choose given the run of a carcass.

Starch barely features. Pea flour at 2% is the only carrier, and estimated carbohydrate converts to 12.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. The pea flour comes from roasted peas and brings plant protein of its own, though at this level its job is to bind the pate, not to prop up the protein figure.

Lignocellulose is the one entry with less to recommend it. It is a purified plant fibre, odourless and close to calorie free, used to give a wet food bulk and structure. It does no harm and it is honestly declared, but it is a manufacturing aid, not an ingredient chosen with your dog in mind.

Calcium carbonate tops the mineral side up to 0.91% of dry matter, a comfortable level for an adult. Behind it the added panel is short, and it doses every entry: vitamin A at 800 IU, vitamin D3 at 250 IU, and zinc, iron, manganese and iodine each printed per kilo. Marigold, kelp, ginger, spirulina and green tea close the list at 0.2% apiece, the herbal signature the brand puts on all of its pates.

£9.37 a kilo. There is one tin size of 400 g, and it comes singly or in a six-pack.

As a guide, feeding works out at around £7.22 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, or roughly 771 grams. That comes off a figure of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for a 15kg dog is 675 grams a day.