Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Favourites Selection in Jelly review

The typical adult wet food earns our Excellent band, because the category scores strongly with us. This tin comes out a good way below that, in our Average band. A gap of that size wants explaining, and the explanation is disclosure, not content. One animal is named at 4% inside a block that is otherwise unnamed, and protein and processing reads Poor on the strength of what that leaves in the bowl, while nutritional balance reads Excellent.

That reads as a comment on the label. The tin itself is not the issue. Chicken is a good, digestible meat, the declared analysis is even handed, and jellied supermarket tins have kept dogs going happily for generations. You are simply asked to take the recipe on trust.

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

The jelly is the point of this pack, and the jelly itself is not explained anywhere on the list, which is common enough on tins of this type. What is explained is the quantity of meat: 36% declared as meat and animal derivatives. That is the legal catch all for the fleshy parts and by-products of warm-blooded land animals, and chicken is named at 4% inside it.

Chicken leads the field in dog food because it is palatable and easy to source, and dogs digest it well. So much food contains chicken that it is also the meat dogs most commonly react to. At 4% of the tin it is the anchor of the recipe on paper, while the great bulk of the animal content stays generic.

Cereals, listed with no grain named, do more work than the wording suggests. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 25.0% of dry matter, where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. No carbohydrate is printed on the label, so the figure comes by difference from the declared analysis.

Various sugars come last, there for taste rather than nutrition and declared without a figure. The added vitamins and trace elements are the opposite, each with a dose printed: vitamin D3 at 150 IU/kg, vitamin E at 15 mg/kg, then iron, zinc, manganese, iodine and copper.

On the analysis, protein converts to 38.9% of dry matter and fat to 22.2%, a fair balance for a tin fed as a full dinner, with calcium at 1.94% of dry matter.

£1.37 a kilo. A pack holds six 400g tins, 2.4kg in total.

As a guide, feeding works out at around £1.48 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 is roughly 1077 grams, or getting on for three tins. The pack's own feeding guide reads 5000 grams a day for a dog up to 5kg, which cannot be taken at face value.