Husse Gourmet Kyckling review

Of all the reasons a wet food can come out low on our scoring, this one leans almost entirely on labelling. It sits in our Average band while the typical adult wet food reaches our Excellent band. The distance comes down to one line: chicken is the only animal named, at 6% of a recipe whose animal content is declared at 80%. Protein and processing reads Average as a result, while transparency comes back Outstanding. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding and deserves to, because protein converts to 44.4% of dry matter, fat to 41.7%, and there is almost no carbohydrate in the analysis at all. None of that is a safety judgement. The gap is between a label that shows its working and a label you simply have to trust.

Ingredients, as declared: meat and animal derivatives 80% (chicken 6%), minerals.

The entire recipe is meat and animal derivatives at 80% and minerals, with chicken picked out at 6% inside the first of them. Meat and animal derivatives is labelling law's own phrase for the fleshy parts and processing products of warm-blooded land animals. Prime meat and the least appealing offcuts sit under it without being told apart. Plenty of European makers reach for it out of habit rather than concealment, but the effect on a reader is the same either way.

The analysis is the strong part of this label. Protein converts to 44.4% of dry matter and fat to 41.7%, so nearly all the dry weight of the food is animal-shaped. The estimated carbohydrate lands at 5.5% where the typical adult wet food sits at 15.8%. Moisture is declared at 82.0%, high even for a wet recipe, and energy works out at 104 kcal per 100g.

There is no cereal, no starch and no vegetable term anywhere on the list, which is unusual enough to be worth crediting. A dog kept away from grain can eat this without any of the guesswork a word like cereals would introduce, and no thickener or gelling agent is declared either.

The added panel stops at three vitamins, A, D3 and E, with a figure against each. Nothing else is printed, so the minerals entry on the ingredient list is presumably carrying the trace elements without naming any of them. A label like this will never let you check a calcium or a zinc level.

£6.13 a kilo. The 300 g size comes on its own and in a case of 18.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at about £4.98 a day, or roughly 812 grams. That works from an assumed 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75.