Primal Spirit Iberian Complete Wet Canned: Mediterranean Farm review

The two recipes finish alongside each other. Both sit in our Good band. The middle of the adult wet shelf is a step above them in our Excellent band, wet food doing well on our scoring as a rule. Both labels lose ground in the same place: generous, specific detail about the meat, then cereals with no grain attached and soy protein with no explanation. Read the cans side by side and what tells them apart is smaller still. The pork can carries more protein once the moisture is out of the way, and the chicken can carries more of the estimated carbohydrate.

Ingredients, as declared: 50% fresh chicken, 30% fresh pork (liver 4%) water, cereals, soy protein, spices, yucca extract.

Ancestral Grassland reads like a butcher's list. Fresh pork at 80% leads, with kidneys at 5% and liver at 4% called out inside it. Organ meat is genuinely welcome in a bowl, liver especially, being dense in vitamin A, B12, copper and iron. Far more often it is folded into a category term than named the way it is here.

Mediterranean Farm takes the same 80% and divides it, 50% fresh chicken to 30% fresh pork with liver at 4% inside the pork. Protein converts to 34.7% of dry matter there against 40.5% on the pork can, and fat runs at 24.8% and 27.0% respectively, so the pork recipe is the richer bowl of the two.

Both labels then arrive at the same two entries. Cereals is a legal catch all covering any grain, so a recipe can move between wheat, maize, rice and barley while the label stays put. Soy protein is a plant concentrate, and it raises the protein figure with no meat behind it. Neither is a hygiene worry. They simply leave a well specified can unspecified at precisely the point a careful buyer wants detail.

Spices and yucca extract close both lists. Yucca is the plant extract long used to make a dog's leavings less noticeable, and tocopherol extracts of plant origin do the preserving. The added panel is printed with doses on both cans: vitamin A at 7954 IU per kilo, vitamin D3 at 509 IU and vitamin E at 159 IU. Zinc follows at 44mg per kilo, iron at 29mg, manganese at 13mg, copper at 2.7mg and iodine at 0.6mg.

Fresh chicken at 50% with fresh pork at 30% and liver at 4% inside the pork, so the pork character stays while the bulk moves to poultry. Protein converts to 34.7% of dry matter, the lighter of the pair, and the estimated carbohydrate is the higher at 27.5%. Both cans land at 124 kcal per 100g, so portions are effectively the same.

£7.50 a kilo on both recipes, in 400g cans sold six to a pack.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at about £5.07 a day on Ancestral Grassland and £5.09 on Mediterranean Farm. The energy assumption behind that is 840 kcal a day, from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That comes to 676 and 679 grams a day respectively, a whisker under two cans either way.