Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Adult Cans: With Chicken In Jelly review

Both cans sit in our Average band, while the typical wet adult food lands in our Excellent band. The distance is largely about disclosure: a four-entry label leaves the animal species, the grains and the sugar level undeclared, and scoring can only credit what a label lets anyone check. Nothing in the analysis reads as alarming, and a dog with no sensitivities to manage can get along here perfectly well. Treat the score as a measure of how much the label tells you, not of how dinner goes down.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (36%, including 4% Chicken, 4% Liver), Cereals, Minerals, Various Sugars.

There are four entries in total, and each is a legal category standing in for an ingredient. Meat and animal derivatives at 36% is the legal umbrella for meat and offal from any approved species, with only the 4% named on the front of the can pinned to an animal. Supermarket cans are commonly built this way, and it gives the maker flexibility. One consequence is that the animals in the tin need not be the same ones next time, and nothing on the label would say so.

Cereals arrive unnamed as well, and the analysis suggests they are working: carbohydrate is estimated at 25.0% of dry matter, where the typical wet adult food runs at 15.8%. Grain is carrying a bigger share of this bowl than wet-food buyers might expect from a jelly can.

Various sugars close the list. In a can like this, sugar is there for colour and palatability rather than nourishment, and with no percentage declared you cannot see how much is going in. Most dogs will never notice it, though an owner minding a waistline or a set of teeth may prefer to know it is there.

Take the water out and the numbers read better than the label suggests. Protein converts to 38.9% of dry matter and fat to 22.2%, entirely respectable figures for an everyday wet food. The added vitamin and mineral panel is short but properly dosed, from vitamin D3 at 150 IU/kg down to copper at 0.5 mg/kg.

At 78 kcal per 100g these are light cans, against the 97 typical for a wet adult food, so portions run generous and a case empties faster under a bigger dog. Some dogs count a big bowl as a bonus.

The chicken can names 4% chicken and 4% liver within its 36% meat content, making it the only one of the pair to declare an organ share. The two cans read alike on our scale and share one band, so this is a choice of meat rather than anything else.

£1.36 a kilo, sold as 400g cans in a case of twelve, 4.8kg in all.

As a guide, feeding works out at about £1.46 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, or roughly 1077 grams a day. Behind it sits about 840 kcal a day, from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75.