Morrisons Tins: Chunks In Jelly review

Our scoring leaves both tins in the Average band, and the typical adult wet food reaches our Excellent band, so there is real distance between the two. Protein and processing reads Poor on the jelly and Average on the loaf, and that is the heart of it. A recipe written as meat and animal derivatives, cereals and various sugars leaves a scoring system very little named meat to reward, whatever the contents turn out to be. Transparency reads Good on both, and nutritional balance reads Good on the jelly and Outstanding on the loaf, so the analysis itself is sound rather than the problem. Dogs have been fed on tins like these for generations and done perfectly well on them, and nothing on this page says otherwise.

Ingredients, as declared: With Beef - Meat and Animal Derivatives (33%, including 4% Beef), Cereals, Minerals, Various Sugars, With Chicken - Meat and Animal Derivatives (33%, including 4% Chicken), Cereals, Minerals, Various Sugars, With Turkey - Meat and Animal Derivatives (33%, including 4% Turkey), Cereals, Minerals, Various Sugars

Meat and animal derivatives is a legal catch-all. It covers the fleshy parts and the processing by-products of warm-blooded land animals. That can be good muscle meat and organ, or it can be far plainer material. The maker is free to change what goes into it while the wording on the tin stays exactly the same. On the jelly tins that term carries 33% of the recipe with 4% named as beef, chicken or turkey. On the loaf it carries 60%, again with 4% named.

The loaf is the meatier of the two once the water is set aside. Its protein converts to 44.4% of dry matter and its fat to 36.1%, against 32.4% and 16.2% for the jelly, so it is both richer and more concentrated. Neither figure is out of the ordinary for a wet food, and the loaf in particular reads as a proper meat tin on the analysis alone.

The jelly tins list cereals without saying which, so wheat, maize, rice and barley are all possible and any of them can be swapped in between batches. Various sugars follow. Sugar goes into a tin for the taste, and a small amount will not upset a healthy dog. It does nothing nutritionally, and plenty of owners would rather not read it on a label. The loaf skips both. It keeps to the meat term and minerals, with rosemary at 0.02% acting as a natural antioxidant and not as seasoning.

Calcium on the jelly tins converts to 1.62% of dry matter, a comfortable level for adult maintenance. The loaf gives no calcium figure at all, which is the pattern across both labels: what is declared is declared thinly.

None of this makes the tins a worry. They are ordinary supermarket food built to a familiar shape, and the reason they read as they do here is that the label tells you so little about itself. If your dog is thriving on them, keep going. If you would rather read the recipe than take it on trust, that is the one thing this label cannot give you.

Chunks in jelly, with the animal content at 33% and 4% of the tin named as beef, chicken or turkey depending on which label you pick up. Cereals and various sugars sit behind it, and the carbohydrate estimate of 37.9% of dry matter is much the higher of the two lines. At an estimated 71 kcal per 100g it is also the lighter tin, so portions run larger.

The chunks in jelly are £1.88 a kilo, in a 400g tin sold six to a pack. The loaf is £1.69 a kilo, in the same 400g tin sold twelve to a pack.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, assume about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Feeding then works out at around £2.22 a day on the jelly and £1.64 a day on the loaf. That corresponds to roughly 1183 grams a day of the jelly or 968 grams of the loaf. Neither label declares its energy, so both of those weights rest on our own calorie estimates. The jelly label's own guide puts a 10 to 20 kg dog on 800 to 1600 grams a day.