Royal Canin Sterilised Loaf review

This loaf finishes in our Average band, some distance below the Excellent band the typical adult wet food occupies. Nearly all of that distance is a matter of description. Protein and processing and transparency each read Average, because a list of category terms leaves a scoring system with little it can verify. Nutritional balance rides on the declared analysis and reads Outstanding. The analysis underneath is perfectly sensible for a lighter adult diet, with protein at 44.2% of dry matter and a moderate 21.1% fat. Royal Canin has fed a very large number of dogs well over the years. What the placement records is that this label asks to be trusted rather than read.

Ingredients, as declared: meat and animal derivatives, cereals, derivatives of vegetable origin, minerals, various sugars, oils and fats.

Meat and animal derivatives opens the list, and it is a legal umbrella rather than a description. It covers the fleshy parts and by-products of warm-blooded land animals, from the choicest to the plainest, with no species and no proportion attached. Big brands use it partly to keep a formula private and partly to keep the recipe flexible from batch to batch, and it is not a hygiene concern. It simply means the animal side of this loaf is whatever Royal Canin sourced that week.

The plant side works the same way, with cereals and derivatives of vegetable origin. One covers any grain at all, the other almost anything that grew or was refined from a plant. Between them the carbohydrate estimate reaches 20.0% of dry matter, where the usual figure for adult wet food is 15.8%. There is a touch more starch here than the category norm. On a diet built around portion control that is not unusual, since starch helps a smaller serving feel like a meal.

Various sugars and oils and fats round out the working list. Sugars are added for palatability. No level is declared, and how much is in play cannot be judged from the label. The oils and fats entry is the same story from the other direction, giving you the 4.0% fat in the analysis without saying where it came from.

Every entry on the added panel carries a dose, and there are not many of them. Vitamin D3 is at 190 IU per kilo, with iron at 2 mg, iodine at 0.3 mg, copper at 2.4 mg, manganese at 0.6 mg and zinc at 6 mg. Moisture is declared at 81.0%, which is what makes an 85g serving a proper meal for a small dog and not a mouthful. It is also why a loaf like this keeps a light eater feeling fed.

£13.76 a kilo, and the pack holds twelve 85g servings.

As a guide, on about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 1095 grams a day. That works out at around £15.07. Royal Canin's own guide is lighter, running from 382.5 grams a day for a 5kg dog to 1062.5 grams for a 20kg dog, which fits a recipe written for dogs whose needs have dropped.