Lukullus Adult Tins Grain Free: Poultry & Lamb review

Our Excellent band holds all five, and so little separates them that the meats your dog prefers should decide it. That is a better result than it first looks. Our Excellent band already holds the middle of the adult wet shelf, so landing there takes a recipe that puts most of the tin into animal. These do. Protein and processing reads Excellent on all five and nutritional balance Outstanding. Transparency moves between Outstanding and Excellent, according to how much naming each label does.

Ingredients, as declared: Complete food for adult dogs of all breeds. Poultry & lamb with potatoes, dandelion and linseed oil: 33 % consisting of poultry hearts, poultry meat, poultry liver, poultry stomachs, poultry necks, 33 % consisting of lamb hearts, lamb meat, lamb liver, lamb lungs, lamb rumen, 28.4 % meat stock, 4 % potatoes, 1 % minerals, 0.1 % dandelion, 0.5 % linseed oil. Energy per 100g: 456kJ/109kCal.

The construction repeats from tin to tin. Two blocks of named animal open the list, usually 33% each, with meat stock between 26.5% and 28.5% bringing it together. The Duck & Veal splits its blocks 36% veal to 30% duck, the Turkey & Trout runs 46% turkey against 20% trout, and the Pork does away with the split at 65%. Protein converts to between 43.3% and 47.7% of dry matter across the range, a properly meat-led analysis for food fed from a tin.

What sits inside those blocks is offal as much as muscle. Hearts lead almost every list, with liver, lung, rumen, necks and stomachs following. Organ meat is dense in exactly the vitamins and trace minerals a dog would otherwise take from a supplement panel. Rumen, which is tripe, is one of the few ingredients that will tempt a dog who has gone off dinner altogether.

The plant side is deliberately thin. Potato appears at 5% and 4%, sweet potato and apple at 3% each, broccoli at 5% and courgette at 5%, and the herbs come in at a tenth of a percent. No cereal reaches any of the five labels. Carbohydrate converts to between 9.7% and 17.0% of dry matter depending on the recipe, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food, so most of these tins sit at or under the usual mark.

Each recipe carries one named oil, at 0.5% or 0.3%: sunflower on the beef tin, linseed on the duck and the poultry, safflower on the pork and walnut on the trout. Those are small inclusions and the real fat comes from the meat itself, which is how fat reaches between 25.0% and 37.5% of dry matter without an oil doing the heavy lifting.

The added panel is short, and each line carries a printed dose. On the main labels: vitamin D3 at 200 IU, vitamin E at 30 IU, biotin at 300 mcg, zinc at 25 mg, manganese at 1.4 mg and iodine at 0.75 mg per kilo. The Pork trades vitamin E and biotin for copper at 0.5 mg, while the Turkey & Trout carries the widest panel of the five, adding B1, B2 and B6 alongside copper. With meat at this level the ingredients themselves supply a good deal of the micronutrition. A short panel here reads as confidence.

Lamb at 33% sits beside a 33% poultry block, and poultry is where this label stops naming. Any proportion of chicken, turkey, duck or goose could be in there. Potato at 4% and a whisper of dandelion finish it. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 12.1% of dry matter, comfortably under the 15.8% typical of adult wet food.

£3.33 a kilo on the Beef & Turkey, Duck & Veal and Poultry & Lamb, £3.07 a kilo on the Pork and £4.58 a kilo on the Turkey & Trout. The tin sizes are 400g and 800g, sold in packs of 6, and most recipes also come as a 24 tin saver pack. The Pork is sold only as a 12 tin pack of the 800g size and the Turkey & Trout only in the 400g.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £2.43 and £3.18 a day depending on the recipe. That rests on about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That corresponds to roughly 695 to 832 grams a day.