JR Complete Wellbeing: Venison & Beef review

All seven recipes land in our Outstanding band and they land there level with one another, a step above the Excellent band where the typical adult wet food finishes. What lifts the Simply pair is not a better ingredient but a clearer one: 90% of a single named meat rather than 45% each of two. Everything else about the seven tins is shared, so the clearer label comes down to how each tin is written, and no recipe here is the lesser one. The analysis says the same thing across the whole range. Carbohydrate converts to between 0.0% and 9.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. Protein converts to between 44.8% and 57.1%. Those figures tell you how little of these tins is anything other than meat and vegetable.

Ingredients, as declared: Venison (45%) Beef (45% meat & hearts), Carrot (8%), Peas (2%), Vitamins & Minerals.

The meat is the whole proposition. Duck, rabbit, turkey, chicken, lamb, beef and venison each appear as a named fresh meat with a printed percentage beside it, and between them they account for 90% of every tin. That is unusually direct for a wet food, where category terms do a great deal of the work on other labels.

Where beef is used, the label says meat and hearts instead of leaving it at beef. Heart is lean working muscle, not offal in the everyday sense. Few things a dog can eat carry more taurine, so naming it counts in the label's favour.

Nothing else from a plant appears on these labels beyond carrot at 8% and peas at 2%. A dog digests cooked carrot easily, and it brings beta carotene with a little soluble fibre. Peas at that level bring a little fibre and plant protein, never enough to look like bulk.

The added panel is short and every line of it carries a figure. Vitamin D3 is at 400 iu and vitamin E at 27 iu. In each kilo there is zinc at 27mg, iron at 20mg, copper at 1.8mg, manganese at 1.5mg and iodine at 1mg. In a recipe this meat-led, most of the micronutrition comes from the food itself. A panel this brief can therefore read as confidence.

Two figures are missing from these labels, a calorie declaration and a calcium level. Neither gap is unusual on a wet tin, and neither changes what is in the food. It does mean the energy numbers on this page come from the analysis and not off the pack.

Venison at 45% with beef at 45%, the beef again as meat and hearts. Venison is the rarest meat in the range and brings a useful set of B vitamins with it. The tin is one of the richer ones, with fat at 37.9% of dry matter and an estimated 144 kcal per 100g.

The Duck & Chicken, Rabbit & Chicken, Turkey & Chicken and Simply Chicken tins are £9.69 a kilo. Lamb & Beef, Simply Beef and Venison & Beef are £10.21 a kilo. Both tin sizes, 200g and 400g, run right across the range.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £5.38 and £6.74 a day depending on the recipe. Behind that sits the standard maintenance estimate, about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75). That corresponds to roughly 527 to 695 grams a day.