James Wellbeloved Adult Pouches: Turkey & Rice Small Breed review

All seven pouches sit in our Average band, finishing close together. Pick on your dog's animal and your feeling about grain, because there is no real gap in quality between them. That places the range below the wet-food average, which reaches our Excellent band, though these labels earn an Outstanding transparency reading by naming the animal parts they use and putting figures beside them. Starch is the ceiling here: a gravy pouch carries more of it than a plain meat tray, and the estimated carbohydrate shows that plainly.

Ingredients, as declared: turkey* 72% in the chunk (necks, heart, deboned ground turkey, liver), mix of white and brown rice (4.5%), dried carrots (1%, equivalent to carrots 7.3%), dried peas (1%, equivalent to peas 3.5%), oils and fats (including linseed oil 0.25%), dextrose, minerals, dried beet pulp (0.56%), seaweed (0.11%), mannan oligosaccharide (0.10%), tomato powder. *100% natural. Chunk typically 37.5% of the product.

The chunk arithmetic is the thing to understand first. A turkey figure of 71% on the label is 71% of the chunk. That chunk usually makes up 42% of the pouch, and gravy fills the rest. Read that way the meat share is smaller than the headline suggests, though it is still declared more openly than most gravy pouches manage.

What goes into the chunk is spelled out, and it is honest offal and trim: hearts, livers, necks and deboned ground meat, with trachea and lung on the lamb recipes. Liver is the standout of them for sheer nutrition, and having it named beats seeing it folded into a derivatives line.

The base splits the range in two. Grain free recipes use pea starch, sometimes with pea protein, while the rest use a mix of white and brown rice at 4.5% or 5.5%. Pea protein lifts a protein figure without adding any meat, so it is worth noticing which labels carry it and where it falls in the order.

Behind that come the vegetables, declared twice over: dried carrots at 1% with their fresh equivalent of 7.3% printed beside them, and dried peas and potatoes handled the same way. Dried beet pulp, seaweed, tomato powder and cellulose finish the list, cellulose being a plain fibre bulker with nothing nutritional about it.

Oils and fats is the one entry that stays vague, though the label at least pins the linseed oil inside it to a figure, running between 0.24% and 0.26% depending on the recipe. Linseed is a decent plant source of omega-3, and printing it to two decimal places is a small piece of candour.

The added panel is short and every line carries a dose. Vitamin D3 is there at 150 IU alongside vitamin E, and copper, iodine, iron, manganese and zinc each carry a figure per kilo. Much of the micronutrition in a meat-led recipe comes from the ingredients themselves. A compact panel here is not a shortcut.

Turkey at 72% of a chunk that is typically 37.5% of the pouch, with rice at 4.5% and a small dose of mannan oligosaccharide at 0.10%, a yeast-derived fibre that gut bacteria feed on. No other recipe here is labelled for one size of dog, so reach for this one if yours is a small breed.

Across the range the pouches run from £8.33 to £13.32 a kilo, sold in boxes of 48, with 12-pouch boxes on some recipes and a 90g pouch size given on two of them.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £8.91 and £14.25 a day depending on the recipe. The range there comes off an assumption of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). In grams that is roughly 1070 to 1141 a day, which is the sort of daily amount a light wet food asks for.