Essential Foods Essential Nautical Living Pate review

Our Excellent band is where this one lands, and it gets there on the strength of the fish rather than on anything added afterwards. The comparison worth making is with the wet shelf as a whole, a strong field on our scoring and typically Excellent in its own right. This is a confident position in good company. Outstanding is the reading for nutritional balance and for transparency. Protein and processing sits at Excellent, and so does value.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon (35%), cod (30%), sweet potato (2%), pea flour (2%), salmon oil (1%), 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%).

Salmon at 35% and cod at 30% are the only two animals in the recipe, and between them they account for 65% of what goes into the tin. Both are named to species, which is more than most fish-based wet foods manage, and protein converts to 38.6% of dry matter with fat at 34.1%.

Salmon oil at one per cent sits above the botanicals in the list. That puts it in as a real inclusion, not a token. Oily fish and their pressed oils are where the long-chain omega-3s in any dog food originate, and this recipe puts both the whole fish and the extracted oil in the same tin.

The plant side is deliberately thin. Sweet potato and pea flour at 2% each are the only starches, and estimated carbohydrate converts to 14.2% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. Four berries at one per cent apiece follow, then lignocellulose, a milled plant fibre that gives a wet recipe structure without bringing calories with it.

The mineral top-up is calcium carbonate, which brings calcium to 0.91% of dry matter. Vitamin A, vitamin D3 and four trace elements follow, each with a printed figure beside it, and the tin closes with the brand's usual 0.2% flourishes of green tea, kelp, spirulina, marigold and ginger. A tin this fish-heavy already brings a good deal of its own micronutrition, which is why the added list can stay this short without leaving gaps.

£9.37 a kilo, sold as a 400 g tin and in six-tin packs.

Feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at roughly £7.00 a day on our estimate, or about 747 grams. That is based on a maintenance need of around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard estimate). At that weight the label asks for 675 grams a day.