Lifelong Pate Trays: With Game review

All four trays finish together in our Average band, while the middle of the wet shelf sits well above them, in our Excellent band. Almost none of that comes from the analysis, which is identical across all four. It comes from a label that puts 4% of the animal content under a name and the rest under a category term. A scoring system can only reward what it is shown. The trays read within a whisker of one another on our estimate of their make-up, which is no surprise when their declared lists run close to word for word the same. None of this is a safety verdict on the food. It is a verdict on the paperwork.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives 62% (4% Game), Minerals.

Meat and animal derivatives is the broadest term a pet food label can use for animal content. In law it covers the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm blooded land animals, plus whatever comes of processing the rest of the carcass. It can hold good muscle meat and organ, or it can hold a great deal less. Between batches the mix can change, while the wording on the tray stays put. Plenty of respectable makers use it to protect a recipe they do not want copied, and plenty of thin recipes hide behind it too. Lifelong pins 4% of the total to a named animal on each tray and leaves the remainder unnamed.

The analysis is where these trays surprise. Protein converts to 52.6% of dry matter and fat to 26.3%, both strong figures for a wet food. The estimated carbohydrate lands at 8.5% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. Whatever the animal content in these trays turns out to be, there is a lot of it and very little starch riding alongside. That is the opposite of the pattern you usually meet in a wet food that will not name its meat.

Only the chicken tray goes beyond meat and minerals. It adds vegetables listed as 4% carrots, a useful thing to find in a wet recipe. Bakery products at 0.5% pasta come next, and at that share they do very little either way except put a cereal on a list that otherwise has none.

The added panel is short, with a printed figure against every entry: vitamin D3, vitamin E, biotin, zinc, manganese, copper and iodine. The chicken tray prints its biotin in milligrams where the other three print micrograms. That reads like a slip on the pack, not a real difference between the recipes, so the doses are described here and not quoted.

Meat and animal derivatives at 62% with game named as the 4%, which puts it alongside the beef tray for construction while giving a dog bored of the usual meats something different to smell.

One 300 g tray size across all four flavours, sold in packs of 10 and 20. There is no per kilo figure on record for this range at the moment, so we have not put a day rate beside it.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat roughly 944 grams a day, working from about 840 kcal a day as the maintenance target (110 × bodyweight^0.75). The tray's own guide puts a dog of 15 to 20 kg on 750 to 1050 grams a day, so the label and the energy sum land in much the same place.