Hero by Asda Working Dog Pate Trays review

This is the strongest analysis in the Hero line by a distance, and it still finishes in our Average band, which tells you how much of our reading depends on naming. Protein and fat convert high, the starch converts very low, and nutritional balance comes out Outstanding as a result, with protein and processing at Average. Transparency reads Excellent, though a 60% animal block that names 4% of itself still leaves most of the tray undescribed. The typical adult wet food sits up in our Excellent band with a great deal more printed on it. For a hard-working dog whose owner is content to take the maker on trust, this tray is doing more than its band suggests.

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

Sixty per cent of this tray is declared as meat and animal derivatives, the largest animal block anywhere in the brand, and 4% of the recipe is named as chicken. The term is a legal category taking in the fleshy parts and processing products of warm-blooded land animals. You are told the quantity. You are not told the species or the cut.

The analysis follows from that. Protein converts to 50.0% of dry matter and fat to 33.3%, figures more often seen on foods with far longer ingredient lists. Estimated carbohydrate is just 5.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. Energy comes to 105 kcal per 100g against a typical 97.

There is no cereal on this label and no sugar either, both of which appear across the rest of the range. That absence is the single biggest reason the tray reads as it does on the analysis, and it makes this the obvious choice within the brand for a dog being kept off grain.

Skin, coat and joints all draw on omega-3 fatty acids, and fish oil at 0.2% is where they come from here. Chicory at 0.1% brings a little inulin to feed the gut's useful bacteria. Both are modest inclusions, and both are the sort of detail a very short list usually leaves out altogether.

The added panel is dosed per kilo and stops at six entries. Vitamin E is at 30 mg and vitamin D₃ at 140 IU, with zinc at 12 mg, manganese at 1.0 mg, copper at 0.5 mg and iodine at 0.3 mg. There is no iron figure and no calcium figure, which is thin for a food this meat-heavy and is part of why the transparency reading sits where it does.

£2.09 a kilo, in 300g trays sold in boxes of 18.

The standard maintenance estimate is about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75). A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat roughly 800 grams a day, a little under three trays, at about £1.67. Because the trays are denser than most wet food, the portion is smaller than the brand's tins ask for at the same bodyweight.