Natural & Delicious N&D Prime Adult Mini Wet: Lamb & Blueberry review

Both recipes reach our Outstanding band, a step clear of the Excellent band where the typical adult wet food lands. The lamb is the stronger of the pair, with the wild boar barely behind it, helped by a leaner analysis and a front end made up of two cuts from a single animal. The range reads as well as it does mostly on candour. The headline meat is named down to the cut and given a percentage, the calories are declared rather than estimated, and every line of the additive panel carries a dose.

Ingredients, as declared: lamb leg (50%), herring, sweet potato, boiled chicken eggs, blueberry (4%), fish oil, animal fat, fructo-oligosaccharides, chondroitin sulphate, glucosamine, vitamins, minerals.

Each label opens with a named cut rather than a general term. Lamb leg carries 50% of one recipe. Wild boar shoulder carries 45% of the other with boar shank following straight after, so between them the two boar entries take the lead. Most wet labels never get as far as the cut. Naming it makes everything below easier to trust.

Herring comes next in both, bringing a marine protein and the oils that travel with an oily fish, and boiled chicken eggs follow. Egg is compact, highly digestible protein, and it is the reason chicken shows up on the allergen reading of a food that never mentions chicken in its name.

The only real starch is sweet potato. Carbohydrate converts to 13.2% of dry matter on the lamb and 21.6% on the wild boar, either side of the 15.8% a typical adult wet food carries, so neither recipe leans on it. Blueberry on one label and apple on the other are each printed at 4%, a flourish. The fructo-oligosaccharides are a prebiotic fibre aimed at the gut.

Both lists close on chondroitin sulphate and glucosamine, with no figure beside either. Read them as a friendly extra. Where the vet already has a small dog on a joint plan, that plan stays and this is the dinner underneath.

The added panel is generous and every entry is dosed. Vitamin A comes in at 4000IU, vitamin D3 at 400IU, vitamin E at 130mg, choline chloride at 400mg, taurine at 500mg and L-carnitine at 50mg, with chelated zinc, manganese, iron and copper behind them. Chelated minerals are the more readily absorbed form, and a printed taurine dose is always a reassuring thing to find on a wet label.

Lamb leg at 50%, with blueberry as the fruit. Fat converts to 28.0% of dry matter here and energy is declared at 116 kcal per 100g, so this is the richer of the pair. Its carbohydrate at 13.2% of dry matter is the lower of the pair.

Both recipes come in a 140 g pack. There is no per kilo figure against this range with us just now.

Take 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at roughly 722 grams a day on the lamb and 767 grams on the wild boar. Both labels declare their energy, so those weights come from the maker's own figures. A dog that size is well outside what these packs are meant for, and a small dog will get through a fraction of it.