Gelert Tripe Variety Tins review

This one comes in at Good on our scoring, and the distance to the Excellent mark a typical adult wet food reaches is almost entirely a naming distance. On the numbers it does well: 50.0% protein and 30.0% fat on a dry matter basis, with carbohydrate down at an estimated 3.0%, about as low as wet food goes. Protein and processing reads Good and nutritional balance Outstanding. Transparency reads Average, because past tripe at 19% and a named meat at 4% the tin is described in the broad legal terms rather than by its actual contents.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (Tripe 19%, Chicken 4%), (Tripe 19%), (Tripe 19%, Beef 4%), Derivatives of Vegetable Origin and Minerals.

British dog feeding has leaned on tripe for as long as there have been tins. It is a ruminant's stomach lining, usually a cow's. It is rich, easy to digest and famously popular with dogs that turn up their noses at everything else. Here it is named at 19% in each of the three tins, which is the one solid figure the composition gives you for the animal side.

Everything else on the animal side sits under meat and animal derivatives, a legal umbrella covering the fleshy parts and by-products of warm-blooded land animals. Which animals and which parts go in is not stated, and a maker is free to change the mix between batches. There is no hygiene worry in it, and tinned food at this end of the market is very often written this way. It does mean you are trusting the maker, because the recipe itself is not there to read.

The numbers are where this range is at its best. Protein converts to 50.0% of dry matter and fat to 30.0%, a rich and meaty profile, while carbohydrate comes out at an estimated 3.0%, well under the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. That carbohydrate number is worked out by subtraction, so read it as an indication rather than a laboratory result. Even generously interpreted, this is a low-starch tin.

Minerals are declared as a single line within the composition and no separate additives table is published, so there is no way to see which vitamins and trace elements went in or at what dose.

£2.00 a kilo. The 400g tins come twelve to a case and the 1200g tins six to a case.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 953 grams a day, which comes to about £1.91. The maths behind that assumes around 840 kcal a day for a dog of that size, from the standard 110 × bodyweight^0.75 maintenance formula.