JosiDog in Sauce: Beef & Carrot review

Our Average band is where the three plain tins finish, with the two carrot recipes a step up in Good, and the typical adult wet food sits above both in our Excellent band. Category terms leave a scoring system with nothing to reward. Meat and animal derivatives can be any warm-blooded animal in any proportion, and cereals can be any grain. The wording stays put while what sits behind it changes from batch to batch. Read the analysis instead and the picture warms up considerably, with dry-matter protein in the high thirties and an estimated carbohydrate only a little above the 15.8% typical for wet food. None of this is a safety verdict. The verdict is about how the meat is described, and the analysis is a separate matter: nutritional balance reads Excellent right across the five.

Ingredients, as declared: meat and animal derivatives (beef 4.0 %); cereals; bakery products (cooked pasta 4.0 %); vegetables (dried carrots 0.45 %, equivalent to 4.0 % fresh carrots); vegetable protein extracts; minerals; caramel syrup

Meat and animal derivatives is the entry that shapes everything else. In European law it covers the fleshy parts of any slaughtered warm-blooded land animal, plus what comes off the carcass afterwards. Good material or very ordinary material can sit behind it with the wording unchanged. Continental makers reach for it more freely than British ones do, so it is not the alarm signal it first looks like. It does mean the recipe is taken on trust.

The named animal is the fixed point on each tin, printed at 4.0%, and it is what separates beef from chicken from game. Everything above that share is unnamed. That is why these tins cannot be used to keep a particular animal in or out with any confidence.

Fish and fish derivatives appears on the beef, chicken and game tins as a second, equally broad heading. It has a real job to do, since fish brings protein and oils a cereal cannot, but the species behind it is not given.

The two carrot recipes read a little differently. Beef and Carrot adds bakery products with cooked pasta declared at 4.0%. Both carrot tins carry vegetable protein extracts, a plant protein of unstated origin, and dried carrots at 0.45% with the fresh equivalent of 4.0% printed beside them. Carrot at that level is a garnish and no more.

Caramel syrup closes each list. It is there to colour the food, and it is the reason sugars show on the allergen reading. At the levels a tin like this uses, it is a cosmetic touch aimed squarely at the person opening it.

The added panel is more generous than the ingredients list suggests, with vitamins A, D3 and E dosed per kilo alongside zinc, manganese, copper and iodine. The beef, chicken and game tins carry taurine at 520 mg per kilo. The analysis holds up too. Protein converts to 38.9% of dry matter on the plain tins and fat to 22.2%. The declared energy of 76 kcal per 100g is the maker's own figure, not our arithmetic.

Beef at 4.0% with cooked pasta declared at 4.0% and dried carrots at 0.45%, equivalent to 4.0% fresh. There is no fish heading on this one, it comes in the larger 830g tin, and at 87 kcal per 100g it is a touch denser than the plain recipes.

Four of the five recipes are £2.76 a kilo and the game tin is £7.16, sold in 415g and 830g sizes.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £2.66 and £3.03 a day on the beef and chicken tins, and about £7.87 a day on the game. Those figures assume around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is roughly 962 to 1099 grams a day, the sort of amount a light wet food needs to reach a dog's daily energy.