Hero by Asda Adult Dog 150g Pate Trays: With Beef & Liver review

Both trays come out in our Average band, and our pillars split on it: nutritional balance reads Outstanding and transparency Excellent, while protein and processing reads Average. Nothing in the analysis is doing the damage. Protein converts to 47.4% of dry matter, genuinely high for a wet food. Estimated carbohydrate at 13.2% sits below the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. What holds the reading down is how little of the bowl is named animal, with 4% of each headline meat the only fixed point on a list otherwise written in category terms.

The typical adult wet food reaches our Excellent band, so this is a long way back from the middle of the shelf. That distance is about declaration and about the added sugars, not about safety. A great many dogs have done perfectly well on this pate from Asda. Should yours be among them, the analysis underneath is sounder than the label lets on.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (60% including 4% Beef, 4% Liver), Minerals, Oils and Fats (0.2% Fish Oil), Various Sugars, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin (0.1% Chicory)

The working list runs to five entries and four of them are legal category terms. Meat and animal derivatives covers 60% of the tray and, in law, means the fleshy parts and processing products of any warm-blooded land animal, in any mix the maker chooses. That is not a hygiene worry and it is common on supermarket wet food. It does mean the recipe can shift from one batch to the next while the wording stays put.

The fixed points are small and useful. Each flavour names two animals at 4% each, which is what separates one tray from the other, and the fish oil inside the oils and fats entry is declared at 0.2%. Fish oil is a genuinely good inclusion. The long chain omega-3 fats it carries support skin and coat and joints. It is a pity the rest of the oil beside it goes unnamed.

Various sugars is the entry most owners will want to think about. Sugars are added because dogs enjoy them, and there is no figure here to tell you how much is going in. On a food fed daily that is worth knowing, though the estimated carbohydrate of 13.2% of dry matter suggests the amount is modest rather than dominant.

Where the analysis does speak, it speaks clearly. Protein converts to 47.4% of dry matter and fat to 26.3%, a lean and protein-forward reading. Moisture is declared at 81.0%, high even for wet food, and part of why these trays carry only 83 kcal per 100g.

Every entry on the short additive panel carries a dose, with vitamin D3 and vitamin E ahead of zinc, copper, manganese and iodine, each with a figure per kilo. Chicory at 0.1% closes the list, a prebiotic root whose inulin is food for the good bacteria in a dog's gut.

Beef at 4% with liver at 4% beside it, the only tray in the pair to name an organ meat. Nutrient dense and highly palatable, liver earns its place, though which animal it came from goes unsaid on the label.

£2.87 a kilo, in a 150g tray sold in a box of 22.

As a guide, feeding works out at around £2.90 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition. That is roughly 1012 grams a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). These are light trays at 83 kcal per 100g, so daily amounts run large. Many owners serve a pate like this alongside a dry food. The label's own guide for a dog of 5 to 10 kg runs from 450 to 750 grams.