Natural & Delicious N&D Quinoa Wet Mini: Senior review

Two of the three settle in our Good band and the duck steps up into Excellent, where the typical adult wet food also lands. The spread follows the ingredients closely enough. The duck recipe is the meatiest and the least complicated of the three, so it reads best across our pillars. The senior recipe hands room to fibre and starch that the duck gives to meat. What the label leaves out holds the digestion recipe back. It prints neither a fibre figure nor a carbohydrate one, so it cannot be converted to a dry matter basis at all. The senior and the duck read Outstanding for transparency, with the digestion tray at Excellent, and protein and processing is Good on the first two and Average on the third. Nutritional balance is Outstanding on the duck and Average on the senior, which is the spread you would expect from three recipes doing three different jobs.

Ingredients, as declared: lamb rack and shoulder (35%), quinoa seed extracted (5%), sweet potato, herring, pork shoulder, powder cellulose, green apple, carob pods, fructo-oligosaccharides, chondroitin sulphate, glucosamine, psyllium husks and seeds, vitamins, minerals.

Quinoa is the common thread, printed at 5% in each recipe. Being a seed, quinoa is no cereal at all, so a household keeping true grains out is well served. It also brings a fuller protein and more fibre than most starches of its size.

The digestion recipe leans on lamb rack and shoulder at 35% and then on hydrolysed fish protein, a protein already broken into small fragments so the gut has less work to do with it. Artichoke and fennel follow. Yeast extract brings manno-oligo-saccharides, and dried brewer's yeast carries a good load of B vitamins. Green tea extract at 50mg closes the list. The catch is the analysis: with no fibre figure printed there is no carbohydrate estimate either, so this is the one recipe here we cannot restate once the water comes out.

The senior recipe swaps all that for a fibre package, with psyllium husks and seeds, carob pods and powder cellulose alongside sweet potato, herring and pork shoulder. Nothing in any of these packs is less interesting than cellulose. It is a purified plant fibre, adding bulk to the food without feeding the dog, and that is exactly why an older dog's recipe reaches for it. Carbohydrate here works out at 36.0% of dry matter where the wet adult norm is 15.8%.

The skin and coat recipe is the simplest of the three and the most meat forward, with duck fillet at 55%, fish oil for its omega oils and coconut at 4%. Protein converts to 46.0% of dry matter and carbohydrate to 14.8%. The label goes as far as printing its protein and carbohydrate sources outright. Duck fillet and quinoa are named, and nothing else.

All three carry the same style of added panel, dosed line by line, with vitamins A, D3 and E, choline chloride, taurine at 500mg and chelated zinc, manganese, iron and copper. Chondroitin sulphate and glucosamine appear on every list without figures, so read them as a small everyday extra rather than a joint programme in their own right.

The senior pack adds sweet potato, herring and pork shoulder to the lamb and finishes the job with fibre, from psyllium and carob pods through to powder cellulose. Of the three it holds the least protein at 29.2% of dry matter and the most carbohydrate at 36.0%. Energy is declared at 96 kcal per 100g.

All three recipes come in a 140 g pack. We hold no per kilo figure for the mini range at the moment.

As a guide, put a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition at about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That dog would eat roughly 862 grams a day of the digestion recipe, 878 grams of the senior or 798 grams of the duck. All three declare their calories, so those weights come from the maker's own figures. A dog that size is far bigger than these packs are built for, and a small dog needs a fraction of it.