Nulo Small Breed Wet Food: Chicken with Salmon & Pumpkin review

Our Outstanding band holds both recipes, and their scores sit so close that quality does not separate them. Pick on your dog's taste. Adult wet food generally reads well on our scoring and the typical tin lands in our Excellent band, so these two sit a step above the shelf around them. Protein converts to 47.7% of dry matter, fat to 36.4%, and the carbohydrate estimate stops at 2.3%. Nutritional balance and transparency both read Outstanding on the pair, and protein and processing reads Outstanding on the salmon recipe and Excellent on the shrimp.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken meat (59%), chicken broth, salmon (4%), pumpkin (4%), chicken liver, sweet potato, carrots, chicken flavour, minerals, pea starch (0.5%), apples, spinach, salmon oil, linseed, inulin, seaweed meal, dried parsley.

Chicken meat leads both lists at 59% and 60%, with chicken broth in second place, so the great majority of each serving is chicken in one form or another. Protein converts to 47.7% of dry matter and fat to 36.4%. By any wet food standard that is a rich, meat led analysis.

The second animal is where the two part company, salmon at 4% in one and shrimp at 4% in the other, and chicken liver appears on both, printed at 3% in the shrimp recipe. Liver is the sort of ingredient that earns its place in a small quantity, being about as nutrient dense as animal food gets.

The plant side is deliberately slight. Sweet potato, carrots, pumpkin, apples and spinach appear in small amounts, and pea starch is capped at 0.5%. The carbohydrate estimate lands at 2.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food sits at 15.8%. The omega 3 comes from linseed and salmon oil. Inulin feeds the gut bacteria, and seaweed meal carries trace minerals including iodine.

One entry stays vague. Chicken flavour is listed without saying what it is drawn from, which is a small thing in a recipe declared this well but still the one line you cannot read properly.

Every entry in the short added panel carries a printed figure: vitamin A and vitamin E on both labels, then copper, iodine, manganese, zinc and iron as trace elements. Copper is the only dose that moves between the two recipes.

Chicken meat at 59%, with salmon at 4% and pumpkin at 4% both declared near the top of the list rather than trailing it. Salmon oil and linseed sit further down, and copper in the trace panel reads 2 mg/kg. If your dog likes an oily fish note in the bowl, reach for this one.

Both recipes come in a single 79 g size. At the time of writing we hold no per kilo figure for this range. No day rate sits beside it either.

On energy alone, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 724 grams a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for a 15kg dog is 1171 grams a day, and for a 2kg dog it is 156 grams.