Naturea Wet Food: Turkey review

We have not put a rating on this range, and the reason sits with the Wild Boar recipe. Its pack publishes a full analysis but no composition whatsoever, which leaves nothing to assess on the ingredient side. Rating the other three while a quarter of the range shows nothing would give a misleading picture of the whole. If the maker publishes that list, the range can be assessed properly.

What the analyses do show is worth having. All four are meat-led, with protein converting to between 31.5% and 45.0% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate never rising above 12.5%, comfortably under the 15.8% adult wet food typically carries. The fat readings split the range in two. The duck at 56.8% of dry matter and the boar at 48.6% are rich foods that suit an active dog. The chicken-led fish and turkey recipes sit at 30.0% and 25.0%, a far more everyday level.

Ingredients, as declared: Fresh Chicken 47.7%, Fresh Turkey 4%, Fresh Carrot 4%, Dehydrated vegetables 1%

The best thing about these labels is what leads them. Every recipe with a published list opens on fresh meat with a percentage attached, and the percentages are substantial: fresh duck at 55%, fresh chicken at 47.7%, fresh chicken at 31.7%. Fresh meat means the animal went into the pan with its water still in it. A percentage of that size reflects a genuinely meat-heavy pan before cooking.

The naming needs care, though. Tuna & Salmon and Turkey are both flavour names describing the accent rather than the bulk, and in each case the bulk is chicken. On the Tuna & Salmon, chicken at 31.7% is nearly twice the tuna at 16% and eight times the salmon at 4%. On the Turkey, chicken at 47.7% dwarfs the turkey at 4%. Nothing is hidden, since the label prints all of it in order. A dog being kept off chicken cannot use either recipe, whatever the pack front says.

The purest recipe here is Duck & Berries, and it is the outlier: fresh duck at 55% and dehydrated blueberries at 2%, and after that no vegetables, no oils and no botanicals. It is also much the richest, with fat converting to 56.8% of dry matter and protein to 31.5%. That is an unusual balance. It suits a working dog or a hard keeper, and it wants a careful eye on portions for a dog with a quiet life.

The Turkey recipe carries two readings that stand out. Crude fibre at 3.0% is high for a wet food built almost entirely on meat, and crude ash at 0.5% is remarkably low. Ash is what remains after the minerals are counted, and a complete diet normally shows considerably more. Both are worth raising with the maker before you feed it as the whole diet.

Wild Boar is where the range runs out of information. There is no ingredients list at all, so beyond the boar in the name there is nothing to describe. Its analysis reads protein at 41.0% of dry matter and fat at 48.6%, so this is clearly a rich meat-led recipe. Everything else about it is guesswork until the maker publishes the composition.

The declared extras differ from pack to pack. Tuna & Salmon is the most forthcoming, printing calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, omega 3 and omega 6 and four added amino acids, while the Turkey prints a shorter version of the same idea. The units used move around between them, with amino acids given per kilo on one pack and per 100 grams on another, so the two are not directly comparable as printed.

Fresh chicken at 47.7% with fresh turkey at 4%, fresh carrot at 4% and 1% dehydrated vegetables, so the turkey is a flavour rather than the substance. Its analysis is the unusual one here, with crude fibre at 3.0% running high and crude ash at 0.5% running very low for a complete wet food. At 80 kcal per 100g it needs a generous serving.

The Duck & Berries is £3.75 a kilo and the other three £3.74, and every recipe is sold as 12 × 400 g packs.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs roughly 567 to 1084 grams a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Depending on the recipe, that comes to between £2.13 and £4.05 a day. The rich duck and boar recipes need the smallest servings and the lighter chicken-led recipes the largest, which is why that range is as wide as it is.