Natures Menu Hearty Stew Cans: With Salmon & Vegetables review

Our Average band is where these tins finish, and the distance between them and the typical adult wet food, which sits up in Excellent, is almost entirely about declaration. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding on these tins, with protein and processing and transparency both Good. One thread runs through what holds them back: a recipe written in category terms leaves our scoring little to reward, a lot of estimated cereal for a tinned food, and no calorie figure printed. None of that is a safety verdict. Natures Menu has fed a great many British dogs perfectly well, and a dog thriving on these tins is a dog whose dinner has not changed. What the score measures is how much the pack is prepared to show you, and this one shows very little.

Ingredients, as declared: SALMON: Meat and animal derivatives, cereals, fish and fish derivatives (4% salmon), vegetables (0.36% dried peas, equivalent to 3.2% fresh peas and 0.09% dried carrots, equivalent to 0.8% fresh carrots), minerals, derivatives of vegetable origin.

The working list is five entries long and four of them are legal categories. Any warm-blooded land animal, in any proportion, can sit under meat and animal derivatives, fleshy parts and by-products alike. Cereals covers any grain, and derivatives of vegetable origin covers almost anything processed from a plant. The fixed point on each tin is the named animal at 4%, which is what separates beef from chicken from lamb. This style of labelling is common across big-brand wet food and says nothing about hygiene or quality on its own. What it asks is trust in the recipe.

One detail sits oddly against that vagueness. The vegetables are declared to the second decimal place, 0.36% dried peas standing in for 3.2% fresh and 0.09% dried carrots for 0.8% fresh. The smallest ingredients in the tin are the most precisely described ones on the label.

The analysis tells you what it can, and it reads better than the ingredient list. Protein converts to 40.0% of dry matter, which is respectable for a wet food, fat to a middling 25.0%, and ash to 10.0%. The number that stands out is the estimated carbohydrate at 23.5% of dry matter against the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. With unnamed cereals second on the list, that is no surprise.

Every entry on the short added panel comes with a dose. Vitamin A is at 1100 IU, vitamin D3 at 140 IU and vitamin E at 10 mg. Copper is at 1.8 mg, zinc at 10 mg, manganese at 2 mg and iodine at 0.1 mg per kilo. The figures do not move between flavours.

So there is a straightforward way to think about these tins. You are buying a British maker's word on what goes into them, a generous serving size and a soft stew most dogs enjoy, and you are giving up the ability to read the recipe. For plenty of households that is a trade they are happy to make with their eyes open.

The salmon tin is the only one that reaches outside the land-animal category. It declares fish and fish derivatives with salmon at 4% alongside meat and animal derivatives, so this recipe carries both fish and land meat in the same tin.

£7.20 a kilo, in 415g cans.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at around £6.95 a day, roughly 966 grams, on a maintenance figure of about 840 kcal a day calculated as 110 × bodyweight^0.75. The label's own guide for a dog of 10 to 25kg is 622.5 grams a day. The calorie figure behind our estimate is not declared on the pack, so read the two side by side.