Morrisons Complete Chunks in Gravy: With Beef & Veg review

Our reading puts this tin in our Average band, with protein and processing and nutritional balance each landing at Good. The typical adult wet food reaches our Excellent band, since the category scores well with us, so a placing this far down deserves explaining. Two things do most of the work. The first is a working list of four category terms, which leaves almost nothing to assess. The second is an estimated carbohydrate of 35.0% of dry matter against the 15.8% that wet foods usually run at. Neither of those is a warning about the food, and plenty of dogs have done perfectly well on tins written exactly like this one.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (Beef 4%), Cereals, Minerals, Various Sugars

Meat and animal derivatives is the animal entry, with beef the 4% named inside it. That term is defined in law and takes in the fleshy parts and processing products of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals. What it describes could be good material or plain material, and the label never tells you which. It also leaves the exact animals free to vary, which is rather the point of using it.

Cereals comes next, and it is the same kind of open term applied to grain: wheat, maize, barley, rice or any blend of them. If your dog has a grain to steer clear of by name, this is not a label that will let you do it.

Various sugars finish the list, sitting after the minerals, so the quantity is small. Their job is taste, not nutrition, and a recipe of this shape gets along perfectly well without them.

On the analysis it does better. Protein converts to 32.5% of dry matter and fat to 17.5%, which are respectable figures for a tinned food. The estimated carbohydrate of 35.0% of dry matter is where the cereals make themselves felt. Energy is on the light side at an estimated 77 kcal per 100g, against the 97 kcal typical of adult wet food, so portions run generously large.

The added panel is short but every entry in it carries a printed dose: vitamin A and vitamin D3, with iodine, copper, manganese and zinc behind them. That level of detail on the additives sits oddly beside a main list that names hardly anything at all.

£1.67 a kilo, in a tin of about 1.2 kg.

Feeding works out at roughly £1.82 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, which is about 1091 grams of food. The basis is 840 kcal a day for a dog that size (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Calories are thin on the ground in any wet food, so a daily amount that looks enormous beside a dry food is normal here.