Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Cans 24 Selection review

Our scoring puts this tin in the Average band, a fair way behind the typical adult wet food, which we place in our Excellent band. The reason is not hidden. The working list runs to four entries, and each one is a legal category with no ingredient described inside it. Beef at 4% is the single named exception, so a scoring system has very little to reward. Protein and processing reads Poor on that basis, with transparency Outstanding and nutritional balance Excellent.

None of which is a health verdict. Meat and animal derivatives covers the best meat and the worst alike, the analysis behind it is ordinary rather than alarming, and dogs have eaten tins built on exactly this pattern for decades. What you are buying is the maker's word rather than a readable recipe.

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

The legal definition of meat and animal derivatives covers the fleshy parts and processing by-products of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals. That is broad enough to take in almost any land animal and almost any part of it. At 36% it is comfortably the biggest thing in the tin, and beef at 4% is the only piece of it described. A generic term leaves the maker free to swap the animals behind it between batches, with the print on the label untouched.

Cereals is the same kind of umbrella, standing for any grain at all. It is doing more than a bit part here, since carbohydrate converts to an estimated 25.0% of dry matter, above the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. We reach that figure by difference from the declared analysis, which is the standard approach when a wet label prints no carbohydrate of its own.

Various sugars round the list off. Dogs like the taste, and sugar helps a sauce look the part. Those are the two reasons it goes into wet food. Here it appears as a category term with no printed amount beside it. If you keep added sugar off your own dog's plate, that is the entry to note.

The analysis itself reads steadily enough. Protein converts to 38.9% of dry matter and fat to 22.2%, both respectable for a wet food, with calcium at 1.94% of dry matter. The added panel is where the label finally gets specific, with vitamin D3 at 150 IU/kg and vitamin E at 15 mg/kg alongside dosed iron, zinc, manganese, iodine and copper.

£1.56 a kilo, sold as a single case of twenty four 400g tins, 9.6kg in all.

As a guide, feeding works out at around £1.68 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to roughly 1077 grams, a little under three tins. The label's own feeding row reads 5000 grams a day for a 5kg dog, which is not a usable figure, so the energy estimate is the better guide.