Hill's Science Plan Small & Mini Adult Dog Food with Chicken (Wet) review

This one lands in our Average band. The list runs to five entries and only the chicken carries a name and a figure, so a scoring system has very little to weigh up. The pillars split: protein and processing and transparency read Good, nutritional balance Average. Labels that itemise what they contain are why the adult wet category as a whole sits in our Excellent band. The tray itself is a mild, watery, easily eaten meal from a maker with decades of dogs behind it, and the placement is best read as a measure of disclosure rather than as a caution.

It is also worth saying that a short list is not automatically a poor one. Here it is short because almost everything has been grouped, which is a different thing from a recipe that genuinely has few ingredients in it.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (chicken 8%), cereals, minerals, oils and fats, derivatives of vegetable origin.

Five entries is a very short list, and short can mean two quite different things. In this case the maker has grouped nearly everything. Meat and animal derivatives covers the animal side apart from the 8% chicken, cereals covers whatever grain went in, and derivatives of vegetable origin closes the list off. Nothing about that is unsafe, and it is a common way for the biggest brands to write a wet label. It does mean the recipe cannot be checked from outside the factory.

Oils and fats deserves a line of its own. The term takes in everything from a decent animal fat through to a heavily processed oil, and the words on the pack give no way of telling which one is in the tray. For a dog eating this as part of a mixed diet it rarely matters, but it is a genuine blank on the label.

Moisture is declared at 80.0%, high even by wet food standards, and that is what puts energy at 81 kcal per 100g. With the water taken out, the analysis reads better than the as fed figures suggest, with protein converting to 27.5% of dry matter and fat to 16.0%. Crude fibre is the outlier at 1.5% of dry matter, which is very little.

The unnamed cereals show their hand in the carbohydrate estimate, 49.0% of dry matter against the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. Calcium converts to 1.0% of dry matter, comfortable for adult maintenance, and the mineral panel is printed dose by dose, iron at 10.0mg per kilo, zinc at 25.6mg, with copper, manganese and iodine behind them.

£6.08 a kilo, in a 200 g tray.

Feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would take roughly 1042 grams a day, or about £6.34, working from an energy need of about 840 kcal (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). A dog that size is not really who the tray is built for, and the small dogs it is aimed at will be eating a fraction of that.