Lily's Kitchen Tins Adult: Sunday Lunch review

Most of this shelf lands in our Excellent band, where the middle of the adult wet market also sits, so a typical Lily's tin is a solidly typical good wet food. The Lamb Hotpot goes a step better again, into our Outstanding band. Fishy Fish Pie reads Excellent for protein and processing, with nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding. Chicken and Turkey Casserole, Lean Machine and Rest Up sit at the quieter end of that band. In each the meat share is a little lower or the plant share a little larger than the shelf norm, with the character unchanged. The Mighty Burrito Bowl sits in our Average band, and arithmetic is the reason. Its analysis stops before crude ash, so protein, fat and carbohydrate cannot be converted to dry matter, and there is less on that label to read and reward. As a plant recipe built on jackfruit, lentils, kidney beans and pea protein it is doing a real job for the households that want one.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (60%); Potatoes (4%); Sugar Snap Peas (2%) Carrots, Spinach, Apples, Vitamins and Chelated Minerals, Herbs, Safflower Oil Herbs & botanicals: Golden Rod, Nettle, Aniseed, Celery Seed, Rosehips, Marigold Petals, Cleavers, Seaweed, Alfalfa, Milk Thistle, Dandelion Root, Burdock Root.

The house recipe is easy to recognise once you have read two or three labels. A named animal, or a pair of them, between 50% and 65%; a handful of vegetables and fruits at low single figures; a mineral or vitamin premix. Under that comes the Lily's tail: burdock root, dandelion root, milk thistle, cleavers, marigold, rosehips, nettles and goldenrod. That tail sits at trace level throughout and gives the food its character rather than its nutrition.

The meat is named by species almost everywhere, and often by preparation too, as fresh chicken, freshly prepared beef or fresh lamb. Fishy Fish Pie goes furthest, splitting its 60% into turkey at 30%, herring at 15% and salmon at 15%, which is a level of detail most wet labels never offer. Fish and Chips is the other three animal tin, with chicken at 28%, herring at 22% and white fish at 10%. That white fish is the only animal entry on the whole shelf that stops short of a species.

Starch is where the recipes separate. Several tins keep it to potatoes at 3% or 4% and land with an estimated carbohydrate around 8% of dry matter. Others reach further: Lamb Tagine takes couscous and brown rice, Beef Goulash takes amaranth and spelt, Chicken and Turkey Casserole takes pearl barley and brown rice, and Pasta Al Ragu takes pasta. None of these is a large amount, but they do mean those four tins are not grain free.

Energy varies a lot across one shelf, from 81 kcal per 100g on Rest Up to 137 on Lamb Hotpot. That is worth knowing when you move a dog from one recipe to another. The lighter tins are the ones holding more moisture; the richer ones carry more fat, with Lamb Hotpot converting to 32.6% fat of dry matter and Pasta Al Ragu to 34.0%.

Rest Up is the odd one out on construction, a six entry recipe of chicken at 50%, potatoes at 11% and bananas at 9% with FOS and MOS at 0.1% each. Those two are prebiotics. In the gut they feed the useful bacteria, and a settling recipe is a sensible place to find them.

The Mighty Burrito Bowl swaps the animal out entirely for jackfruit at 10%, rice, pea protein, lentils, red peppers at 4% and kidney beans at 2%. Sunflower and linseed oils and a yeast sit among the smaller entries. Vegan complete food is a small corner of the wet shelf, and this one declares its plant entries as openly as the meat tins declare theirs.

Chicken at 60% with potatoes at 4% and sugar snap peas at 2%, plus carrots, spinach, apples and safflower oil. The most conventional roast dinner on the shelf and one of the steadiest analyses on it.

The 400g tins are £9.50 a kilo and the 150g tins are £11.33 a kilo.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £6.95 and £11.20 a day depending on the recipe. The basis is about 840 kcal a day, or 110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate. That corresponds to roughly 613 to 1037 grams a day, the smaller portions going to the richer tins such as Lamb Hotpot and the larger ones to the lighter recipes such as Rest Up.