K9 Optimum Adult Can review

Our Good band is where this tin settles, a step below the Excellent band the typical adult wet food reaches. The reasons are all visible on the label. Minerals are the second ingredient, which lifts ash to 16.0% of dry matter and calcium to 3.0%, both on the high side for adult maintenance. Protein converts to 40.0% of dry matter, solid for a wet recipe without being remarkable. Working the other way, carbohydrate converts to 13.5% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. The chicken is named and quantified where the list begins, and the energy figure is declared on the pack. This is a straightforward, well described everyday tin that gives up a little ground on mineral load and very little elsewhere.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (50%), Minerals, Potato Starch, Poultry Plasma (1%), Dried Carrot, Dried Potato, Flaxseed Oil, Salmon Oil, Dried Seaweed, Chicory Root Powder, Glucosamine Hcl, Chondroitin

The list opens with chicken at 50%. Nothing else a wet label prints is as useful as a percentage against the meat. Chicken tops every other meat in dog food for sound reasons: dogs digest it easily and few of them refuse it. That popularity has a flip side, since chicken intolerance is the one seen most often. Keep that in mind if poultry has given your dog trouble before.

Most owners will not have met poultry plasma at 1% before. It is the liquid fraction of poultry blood, dried and used in small amounts to make food taste better and to add protein. A quantity is printed, and that is good. The species is not, and poultry takes in chicken, turkey, duck and goose alike.

Minerals sit unusually high in the list, second only to the chicken, and the analysis shows why that is worth noticing. Ash converts to 16.0% of dry matter and calcium to 3.0%. A healthy adult dog handles that without difficulty, though if yours has any urinary or kidney history it is a sensible thing to raise at the next appointment.

Potato starch and dried potato do the starch work, and there is not a lot of it, with carbohydrate converting to 13.5% of dry matter. Potato starch is close to pure starch, and nutrition is not what it is there for. At this level it holds the food together and does not bulk it out.

This label earns its keep in the small print. Omega-3 fats come from the flaxseed oil and the salmon oil. Dried seaweed is a natural iodine source. Chicory root powder supplies inulin, a fibre the useful gut bacteria live on. None of those four is quantified in the ingredients list.

Glucosamine and chondroitin close the list without figures beside them. Read them as a small kindness to a working joint rather than a measured programme, and keep any dose your vet has set exactly as it is.

The added panel, by contrast, is dosed line by line. Vitamin A is at 1500IU, vitamin D3 at 250IU and vitamin E at 40mg. In every kilo there is also L-carnitine at 25mg, zinc at 20mg, iron at 15mg, manganese at 5mg, copper at 1.2mg and iodine at 0.5mg. L-carnitine helps move fat into the muscle where it can be burned, and that is why recipes aimed at keeping a dog trim tend to include it.

£5.13 a kilo, sold in a 390g tin.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at around £4.51 a day, or roughly 880 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own table lands in much the same place, putting a dog of 15 to 20kg on 878 to 1040 grams a day.