Hill's Science Plan Adult 1-6: With Chicken review

An Average reading on three tins from a name as established as Hill's needs explaining. Protein and processing and transparency come back Good, with nutritional balance at Average. All three read the same page: five entries in the composition, and exactly one of them is an ingredient anybody could point to.

Adult wet food is a category that scores well on our system, its typical member landing in our Excellent band, and part of how those foods earn it is by printing what is inside them. These tins choose not to, and the estimated carbohydrate share is high for something fed from a tin, so the shortfall is real.

It is not a safety finding. These are made to a fixed nutritional specification by a company that runs its own feeding research, and dogs eat well on them year after year. Our scoring weighs the label, and this label offers five lines.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (chicken 9%), cereals, minerals, oils and fats, derivatives of vegetable origin.

Every tin reads the same way: meat and animal derivatives with the headline meat named in brackets, then cereals, minerals, oils and fats, and derivatives of vegetable origin. Four of those five are legal umbrella terms. Meat and animal derivatives can be any part of any warm blooded land animal, and cereals any grain. Oils and fats can be fat of any origin, while derivatives of vegetable origin takes in almost any plant material. The fixed point in each recipe is the 9% of beef, chicken or turkey printed on the front, which is also the only thing separating one tin from the next.

That style of labelling is ordinary in big brand wet food and is not a hygiene question. What it does mean is that the maker can adjust the recipe between batches without a word changing on the pack, and that you are buying on reputation rather than on a list. Hill's has more reputation to buy on than most, which is a fair part of why these tins sell as steadily as they do.

The analysis is where the three tins genuinely differ. The chicken tin converts to 26.5% protein of dry matter, the beef to 24.8% and the turkey to 23.5%, all moderate for wet food. Fat runs the other way, at 13.0%, 14.8% and 18.3% of dry matter respectively. Pick the turkey if your dog needs the extra, and the beef if it does not.

Estimated carbohydrate is the figure to look at. The beef tin works out at 56.1% of dry matter and the other two at 51.7%, where 15.8% is typical for adult wet food. Cereals are doing a share of the work here more usually seen in a dry recipe, which is worth knowing if you were choosing wet food specifically to keep starch down.

Calcium converts to between 0.7% and 0.87% of dry matter, a comfortable range for adult maintenance. Iron, iodine, copper, manganese and zinc each carry a printed dose. The figures barely move whichever meat you choose, a quiet sign the three tins share a single formulation.

Moisture is declared at 77.0% across the range. That is what a wet food is, and it is the reason a dog on these tins drinks less and eats more by weight than the same dog on a dry meal.

Chicken named at 9%, and the highest in protein of the three at 6.1% as declared, which converts to 26.5% of dry matter. Fat sits between the other two at 14.8% of dry matter and the tin carries 92 kcal per 100g. More dog food is made with chicken than with any other meat, and more intolerances trace back to it. Skip this tin if your dog has already reacted to it.

Sold in 370 g packs, in beef, chicken and turkey.

No checked per-kilo figure was available for the range when this was written, so no day rate is given below it. For portioning, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would work through roughly 873 to 926 grams a day depending on which tin is open. That takes about 840 kcal a day as the maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). Wet food carries its calories in a great deal of water, so daily amounts always look large beside a dry measure.