Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Pate Multipack review

This pate reads better than the brand's jellied and gravy tins and still comes out in our Average band, with the typical adult wet food up in our Excellent band. The lift comes from the recipe itself: 60% animal content and protein converting to 47.4% of dry matter. Estimated carbohydrate is 13.2% of dry matter, under the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding and transparency Excellent on the back of that, with protein and processing at Average.

What holds it down is the same thing that holds the whole range down. Protein and processing reads Average, because the animal content arrives as one undivided block with no named meats inside it. The oils, the sugars and the vegetable derivatives behind it add nothing to that side of the recipe. There is a decent everyday food somewhere inside this label. The label simply will not point at it.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (60% including 4% Chicken), Minerals, Oils and Fats, Various Sugars, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin.

Sixty per cent animal content is the headline, and by the standards of everyday supermarket wet food it is a real one. Meat and animal derivatives works as a legal umbrella. It takes in the fleshy parts of warm-blooded land animals and the by-products of processing them. So the quantity is genuine and the set of animals is unspecified, with chicken at 4% the only one named.

That quantity shows up in the analysis. Protein converts to 47.4% of dry matter and fat to 26.3%, a properly meaty profile for a wet food. Estimated carbohydrate at 13.2% of dry matter comes in under the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. We take carbohydrate by difference from the declared analysis, since the label itself prints none.

Oils and fats is the entry most worth a second look. Good animal fat, plant oil or fish are all possible, and nothing on the label settles it. For most dogs that is a non issue. For a household avoiding fish specifically, it is the reason this one cannot be leaned on.

Various sugars are here as they are across the range, in for palatability and declared without a figure. Derivatives of vegetable origin is the last entry and the vaguest of them, standing for processed plant material of very nearly any kind.

The added panel is short and dosed: vitamin D3 at 140 IU, vitamin E at 30 mg, then zinc, copper, manganese and iodine each with a printed figure. Calcium converts to 1.58% of dry matter, comfortable for adult maintenance.

£2.49 a kilo, in 150g portions sold twelve to a pack, 1800g in total.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 966 grams a day, working out at about £2.40, assuming roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is between six and seven portions, so the multipack fits a smaller dog's routine more neatly than a big dog's.