McIntyres Wet Cans: Chicken review

Both tins are placed in our Average band, and protein and processing is the pillar carrying it, reading Poor on each. Almost nothing is identified: the meat is a category, the cereals are a category, the vegetable content is a category, and sugars are added on top of all three. The fairer half of the story is nutritional balance, which reads Excellent, with protein converting to 36.8% of dry matter and fat to 29.1%. The figure that stands out is the estimated carbohydrate at 20.0% of dry matter against 15.8% for adult wet food generally, which points at the unnamed cereals rather than at the meat. Adult wet food typically settles in our Excellent band, and the distance to it here is made of names this label does not give.

Ingredients, as declared: transcribed from the pack panel: Meat and Animal Derivatives 40% (including 4% Chicken), Cereals, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Minerals,Various Sugars. The website prints this differently:Meat And Animal Derivatives (40%), Chicken (4%), Cereals, Derivatives Of Vegetable Origin, Minerals, Various Sugars

Five entries make up the whole composition and four of them are legal umbrella terms. Meat and animal derivatives at 40% can be any warm blooded land animal in any proportion, cereals can be any grain, and derivatives of vegetable origin can be almost anything grown and processed. The named species holds 4%, and that is the single fixed point on the list. A recipe written this way can be perfectly sound; the difficulty is that there is no way to check.

The analysis reads better than the composition above it. Protein converts to 36.8% of dry matter with fat at 29.1%, and moisture is declared at 78%, all of it normal territory for a tinned food. Where it slips is the carbohydrate estimate, converting to 20.0% of dry matter against a 15.8% typical, so the cereal share is larger than a wet recipe usually carries.

Various sugars appear on both labels. Sugar in a tin is there for taste and colour and dogs take to it much as we do, which makes it worth noticing on a food that will be eaten every day for years.

The additive panels are dosed but they do not match each other. The beef label prints vitamin A at 2,250 IU, vitamin D3 at 328 IU and vitamin E at 26 mg, with a full trace set that includes iron and selenium. The chicken label prints vitamin A at 3750 IU, vitamin D3 at 375 IU and vitamin E at 20 mg, with a shorter trace list. Same recipe, two panels, and the maker's own website prints a third.

Chicken takes the named 4%, with the same 40% of meat and animal derivatives behind it. At 102 kcal per 100g it is the lighter tin of the pair, and its additive panel is the shorter one, listing vitamins A, D3 and E alongside zinc, manganese and iodine.

£1.35 a kilo across both flavours, in 400g cans boxed in twelves.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition the beef works out at about £1.07 a day and the chicken at about £1.11, roughly 792 and 824 grams. Behind that sits a maintenance need of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard estimate). The small difference between them is energy, since the beef tin carries a few more calories in every 100g.