Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Meaty Selection in Gravy Cans review

Our Average band is where this recipe finishes, and most adult wet food does better, the typical tin landing in our Excellent band. The distance comes almost entirely from disclosure. One animal is named, no grain is, the sugars carry no quantity and the gravy goes unexplained, and that is what keeps protein and processing in our Poor band, while nutritional balance reads Excellent.

That is a scoring outcome and not a caution. A tin built on this pattern has fed dogs perfectly well for a very long time, and the declared analysis behind it is even tempered. If you want to know precisely what is in your dog's dinner, though, this label was never designed to tell you.

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

What sets this one apart is the gravy, and the label explains it least of all. Somewhere within the cereals and the various sugars sits the thickening and the sweetening that give the sauce its body. Neither entry is broken down, so the gravy arrives as a finished effect and never as a recipe.

The meat block is 36% of the tin, declared as meat and animal derivatives. That phrase is legal shorthand for the meat and the by-products of any warm-blooded land animal, top grade and bottom grade alike. A maker can change animals between batches without touching a word of the print. Chicken at 4% is the fixed point in it.

Carbohydrate is the figure that moves the needle. Estimated at 25.0% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food, it says the unnamed cereal is carrying a real share of the tin. We arrive at that number by difference from the declared analysis, the usual route when a wet label leaves carbohydrate out.

Set against that, the declared analysis is sound: protein at 38.9% of dry matter, fat at 22.2% and calcium at 1.94%. The added panel is properly dosed too, with vitamin D3 at 150 IU/kg, vitamin E at 15 mg/kg and printed figures for iron, zinc, manganese, iodine and copper.

£1.36 a kilo, in 400g tins boxed twelve at a time, 4.8kg to the box.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at around £1.46 a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is roughly 1077 grams, close to three tins. The printed feeding row, 5000 grams a day for a dog up to 5kg, does not stand up, so the energy estimate is the one worth using.