Riverwood Fish Sausage: Cod & Trout review

All three sausages come out in our Excellent band with barely anything between them, so the choice here is about which fish your dog prefers. The category scores strongly with us, so the typical adult wet recipe carries that Excellent label too. This range keeps good company with the field. The fish content is what carries the three, and the buckwheat and pea base is what stops them going further. Carbohydrate is estimated at between 20.0% and 24.2% of dry matter, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food.

Ingredients, as declared: 44% cod, 26% trout, 13% water, 4% peas, 4% spinach, 3% buckwheat (hulled), 3% buckwheat flour, minerals, 0.5% ground rosehip, 0.3% dill.

Named fish makes up seventy per cent of each sausage, cod at 44% and the partner species at 26%. Both are pinned to an actual fish, not left as a category term. Water follows at 13%, with the figure printed on the label.

Buckwheat does the starch work, at 3% hulled and 3% as flour. The name misleads: it is a seed, not a cereal grain. Peas sit alongside at 4%. At that sort of level peas are there for fibre and micronutrients, not for bulk.

Spinach at 4%, ground rosehip at 0.5% and dill at 0.3% finish the list. Those quantities flavour and colour the food without feeding your dog much, and none of them is the reason to buy the sausage.

Protein converts to between 40.7% and 48.8% of dry matter, which is a proper fish-led analysis. Ash is the reading to notice, running from 15.2% to 16.9% of dry matter and higher than most wet recipes. The minerals line carries no percentage, so the label cannot tell you how much of that comes from added minerals and how much from the fish itself.

The added panel is short and printed with figures: vitamin E at 25 mg, zinc at 15 mg, manganese at 3 mg and iodine at 0.5 mg. The label prints those doses without stating the quantity of food they apply to, so treat them as an indication of what is in there rather than a number you can work with.

Trout at 26%, a fish that rarely turns up in a dog bowl, sitting between its stablemates on fat at 16.6% of dry matter and on energy at 109 kcal per 100g.

£8.69 a kilo across all three recipes, sold as an 800 g sausage.

Feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £5.85 and £8.22 a day depending on which fish you pick, or roughly 673 to 946 grams. Those figures assume about 840 kcal a day for a dog that size (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The tuna sausage carries the fewest calories per 100g, which is why it takes the most of it to fill a day.