Primal Spirit Iberian Complete Wet Sausage: Nordic Sealand review

The four sausages sit level with one another in our Excellent band, Ancestral Grassland the strongest of them by a whisker. They land level with the middle of the adult wet shelf, because wet food as a category scores well with us. The reason is the same on every label: a headline meat figure most makers would love to be able to print, followed by cereals and soy protein that explain nothing at all. The sausages carry less water than the cans do, so more of each slice is actual food, and that shows up in the protein figures rather than in where the bands fall.

Ingredients, as declared: 55% fresh pork, 35% fresh fish, water, cereals, soy protein, fish oil, potato starch, spices, tocopherol, yucca extract.

The four recipes are the canned range in a different coat. Ancestral Grassland runs 83% fresh pork, and kidneys at 5% and liver at 4% are named inside it. Mediterranean Farm sets 45% fresh chicken against 35% fresh pork, Nordic Sealand pairs 55% fresh pork with 35% fresh fish, and Wild Forest runs 60% fresh pork with 21% fresh turkey. All of those numbers are printed on the label, and most products of this type do not go that far.

Less water is the real difference from the cans. Moisture runs from 63.8% to 65.8% here, so protein reads between 13.0% and 14.2% as fed and between 36.1% and 41.5% once the moisture is taken out, with fat between 28.4% and 32.0%. That density is why a daily slice weighs so much less than a canned portion of the same energy.

Then every label reaches the same two entries. Cereals can be any grain, and it can change without a word moving on the wrapper. Soy protein is a plant concentrate propping up the analysis. Nordic Sealand adds potato starch, which is starch and very little else. None of this is alarming for a dog with a steady stomach, and none of it can be planned around if you are excluding an ingredient on purpose.

Tocopherol goes into the ingredients themselves here rather than being listed separately, a natural way to keep the fats fresh in something you slice over several days. Spices and yucca extract finish each list, yucca having a long reputation for making the garden less pungent.

The added panel is the same on all four and it is properly dosed: vitamin A at 7954 IU per kilo, vitamin D3 at 509 IU and vitamin E at 159 IU. Then come zinc at 44mg per kilo, iron at 29mg, manganese at 13mg, copper at 2.7mg and iodine at 0.6mg. Naming and dosing that panel while leaving the grain as cereals is the one puzzle running through the whole range.

The fish one, with fresh pork at 55%, fresh fish at 35% and fish oil added on top, giving 90% animal content on the label. At 41.5% of dry matter this carries the most protein of the four, and its estimated carbohydrate is the lowest at 18.1%. Potato starch is the extra entry it alone holds.

£8.99 a kilo, sold as a 1kg sausage.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £4.01 and £4.40 a day depending on the recipe. All of that rests on 840 kcal a day, which the standard maintenance estimate puts at 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That comes to between 446 and 489 grams a day, so one sausage feeds a dog of that size for roughly two days.