Primal Spirit Iberian Complete Wet Canned Nordic Sealand review

This can settles in our Excellent band, alongside the middle of the adult wet shelf. Wet food scores well with us as a rule, and the best of that shelf sits a band above in our Outstanding band. The gap is not about the meat, which is plentiful and named. It comes from everything behind the meat: cereals with no grain given, and soy protein doing part of the protein work. The estimated carbohydrate share is on the high side for something spooned out of a can. Protein and processing and transparency both read Excellent here, with nutritional balance a rung higher in Outstanding and value in step with the can at Excellent. For a dog who enjoys it, none of this makes a poor dinner. It means the label stops explaining itself at the point where our scoring starts asking.

Ingredients, as declared: 50% fresh pork, 30% fresh fish, water, cereals, soy protein, fish oil, potato starch, spices, yucca extract.

Half the can is fresh pork and another 30% is fresh fish, so 80% of what goes in is animal before anything else joins it. Pork is worth a moment. It is rare enough in dog food that a good many dogs will never have tasted it. That is useful when the usual suspects have caused trouble before. Protein converts to 38.0% of dry matter and fat to 24.0%.

Then the label changes register. Cereals is a heading wide enough to hold the best grain and the worst, and one batch can differ from the next with nothing moving on the tin. Soy protein is a concentrated plant protein lending weight to the analysis, and potato starch is starch with little else attached. Between them the estimated carbohydrate reaches 24.4% of dry matter, above the 15.8% typical for adult wet food.

Fish oil is here in earnest, not as a token, and it carries the omega-3 oils that oily fish are valued for. Tocopherol extracts of plant origin keep the fats from turning, which is the natural preservative route rather than a synthetic one, and spices and yucca extract finish the ingredients.

The added panel is the most carefully written part of this label. Vitamins A, D3 and E each come with a figure, at 7954, 509 and 159 IU per kilo. The trace minerals are given the same treatment: zinc at 44mg, iron at 29mg, manganese at 13mg, copper at 2.7mg and iodine at 0.6mg per kilo. A can that described its cereals with the same care would read very differently.

£7.50 a kilo, in 400g cans sold in packs of 6.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at about £5.41 a day, or roughly 722 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is a shade under two cans a day.