Natures Menu Country Hunter Pouches: Beef with Superfoods review

Beef, chicken, turkey and duck all settle together in our Excellent band. The adult wet shelf scores strongly with us, and its midpoint is itself an Excellent-band food, so the whole range is holding station in that company. The duck keeps pace with them despite declaring 55% meat where the others declare 60%, and despite coming in lowest of the four for protein and for calories. Across all four pouches protein and processing reads Excellent, nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding, and value Excellent again. The four match one another pillar for pillar, which is the shape of a range built to one recipe.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef 60% inc. 4% lung, 4% trimmings, Sweet Potato 2%, Carrots 2%, Green Beans 2%, Mixed Berries 2%, Spirulina 0.5%, Yucca Extract, Green Tea Extract, Rosemary Extract

Look at this range for the meat figure. Beef, chicken and turkey are each declared at 60% and duck at 55%. The label then opens that number up. It is 4% lung and 4% trimmings on the beef, and 4% liver and 4% trimmings on the chicken. The turkey gives 4% liver, 4% stomach and 4% trimmings, and the duck 4% each of heart, neck and stomach. Organ meat is dense in the nutrients a dog uses well, and seeing it weighed is more than most wet labels offer.

Once the moisture is stripped out the analysis stays meat-shaped. Protein converts to between 42.9% and 50.0% of dry matter across the four, and estimated carbohydrate sits between 10.0% and 12.4% where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. There is no cereal on any label, so the small starch load comes from sweet potato at 2% and the vegetables alongside it.

The duck recipe takes a different route through the plant list. Instead of sweet potato, berries and spirulina it carries plum at 3%, green beans at 3%, apples, swede and carrots at 2% each and spinach at 1%, finished with a dehydrated vegetal broth. It is a genuinely separate recipe wearing the same range name.

The botanicals at the tail are working ingredients rather than decoration, though they sit at trace level. Yucca extract has a long history as a digestive aid, green tea extract carries antioxidants, and rosemary extract earns its place mostly by keeping the fats in the pouch fresh without a synthetic preservative.

The added panel is short and dosed, running through vitamin D3, vitamin E, zinc, manganese and iodine, with vitamin A and copper appearing on some labels and not on others. A recipe this meat-rich draws much of its micronutrition from the food itself, which is why a compact panel here is not the same as a thin one.

Beef at 60%, with lung at 4% and trimmings at 4% named inside that share. This is the richest pouch in the range, with fat converting to 33.3% of dry matter and 131 kcal per 100g, so portions run smallest here.

Every flavour is £10.60 a kilo, in a single 150g pouch.

As a guide, assume about 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. Feeding works out at between £6.80 and £10.23 a day depending on the flavour. That comes to roughly 641 to 966 grams, and the beef sits at the bottom of that spread because it carries the most energy per gram. For a dog of 10 to 25kg the label's own guide asks 450 grams a day of the beef, and 600 grams of the other three.