Gelert Working Dog Variety Tins review

A Good-band finish, and the four named meats are a fair part of why it is not lower. There is a step from here up to the Excellent band the typical adult wet food occupies, and the step is a naming one. Past chicken, beef, lamb and turkey at 4% apiece, the tin is described in category terms that can be met differently from batch to batch. Our transparency pillar reads Poor for that reason, while protein and processing reads Good and nutritional balance reads Outstanding. On the figures this is a solid tin, with protein converting to 45.5% of dry matter and carbohydrate to an estimated 11.8%, under the 15.8% typical for the category.

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

Chicken, beef, lamb and turkey are all named and numbered at 4% each. Not many tins at this end of the shelf go that far. Everything else on the animal side is meat and animal derivatives, the legal umbrella for the fleshy parts and by-products of warm-blooded land animals. That term covers excellent material and ordinary material alike, and no label using it lets you tell which you have bought.

There is no cereals entry at all on this composition, which sets it apart from Gelert's sporting tins. What stands in for it is derivatives of vegetable origin, a term broad enough to cover cereals, vegetables, legumes and oil seed, so grain may still be present without being named. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 11.8% of dry matter, below the 15.8% typical for adult wet food, so whatever is in there is not being used heavily.

The analysis reads well for a tin of this kind. Protein converts to 45.5% of dry matter and fat to 27.3%, a properly meat-led combination, with ash at 13.6%. One caveat sits behind all of those figures: the label does not declare moisture, so the dry matter column is built on an assumed 78%, the usual working figure for a tin. If the real moisture differs, every dry matter number here moves with it.

Minerals are listed in the composition with no separate additives panel behind them. A vitamin and mineral supplement has clearly gone in, though which nutrients and what doses is never printed.

£1.92 a kilo. A case holds twelve 400g tins, or six 1200g tins.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to about £1.70 a day, or roughly 883 grams. We take a dog of that size to need around 840 kcal a day, using the standard maintenance calculation of 110 × bodyweight^0.75.

Wet food is light on calories for its weight, so those daily amounts look big beside a dry food, and a working dog will be getting through several tins a week.