Hill's Science Plan Puppy Food with Chicken, with Beef review

Our Average band is where this tin lands, and the gap to the Excellent band a typical wet puppy food occupies comes down to naming rather than to nutrition. Protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency each come back Good. There is nothing evasive about the printed figures, which run to a full analysis and a usable calcium number. The difficulty is an ingredients list that names one meat by percentage and covers everything else with legal categories.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (chicken 21%), cereals, derivatives of vegetable origin, minerals, oils and fats.

The name of this tin does more work than the ingredients list does. Chicken is declared at 21%, sitting inside meat and animal derivatives, and beef is on the front of the pack yet never appears in the declaration. Where a product name and an ingredients list disagree, the list is the document that counts, so read this as a chicken recipe with unidentified animal material alongside the chicken.

That opening entry is a legal umbrella stretching across the flesh and by-products of any warm-blooded land animal. Good makers use it and weaker ones use it, so its presence is not evidence of a poor tin on its own. What it does mean is that nobody outside the factory can say what share of the meat is muscle, what share is organ and what share is something else again.

Cereals and derivatives of vegetable origin do the same job on the plant side of the recipe. Between them they explain why carbohydrate converts to an estimated 37.9% of dry matter, several times the 13.6% a typical puppy tin runs at. Protein still converts to 28.8% of dry matter and fat to 20.8%, so the tin is far from thin; it is simply built more on cereal than the shelf around it.

Calcium is the bright spot in the printed figures. It converts to 1.33% of dry matter, comfortably inside the window a growing skeleton needs, and it is declared rather than implied. Ash converts to 7.5% of dry matter alongside it, a sensible mineral load for a pup being reared on wet food.

The additive panel comes with its doses attached: zinc at 24.6 mg/kg, iron at 9.6 mg/kg, manganese at 2.1 mg/kg, copper at 1.6 mg/kg and iodine at 0.3 mg/kg. Energy sits at 99 kcal per 100g against the 106 typical of the category, so a hungry pup will work through a fair amount of tin in a day. Crude fibre converts to 5.0% of dry matter.

£6.22 a kilo, sold in 370g tins.

A puppy's portion keeps moving while they grow. Let the pack's chart and your dog's shape set the daily amount, and revisit it as the months pass.