Sainsbury's Complete Nutrition Senior Cans in Jelly review

Our Average band is where the senior tin comes to rest, some way under the typical adult wet food, which we place in our Excellent band, and protein and processing reads Poor. The reasons run through this whole range: a list of category terms, a single animal named at 4%, an unnamed grain and undeclared sugars. Together they leave a scoring system very little to hold on to.

The senior positioning does not change that and the joint pair is too small to move it either. What an older dog actually gets here is simpler than the front of the label suggests. It is a soft, moist dinner, easy to eat, with a lighter fat level than the standard adult recipe. That is the thing to judge it on.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (36%, including 4% Chicken), Cereals, Minerals, Various Sugars, Glucosamine (0.005%), Chondroitin (0.002%).

This is the brand's jellied recipe with two additions on the end, so most of what is in the tin is described in the same broad language. That opening 36% of meat and animal derivatives is a legal category, covering the fleshy parts and by-products of warm-blooded land animals. Chicken at 4% is the only piece of it named by species.

What sets the senior tin apart is glucosamine at 0.005% and chondroitin at 0.002%, both with a printed figure beside them. A good many foods only imply as much. The amounts, though, are very small. A dog with diagnosed joint trouble will be on a dose from the vet that a tin like this cannot approach. Think of the tin as the dinner underneath that treatment, not a stand in for it.

The analysis suits an older dog reasonably well. Protein converts to 47.1% of dry matter, fat to a moderate 20.6%, and calcium sits at 1.76% of dry matter. The 17.6% carbohydrate is our estimate, what is left once the declared analysis is subtracted. It runs a shade above the 15.8% typical of adult wet food because of the unnamed cereal.

Various sugars close the list, in for palatability and printed without a quantity. The added panel is the precise part of this label, with vitamin D3 at 187 IU/kg, vitamin E at 18 mg/kg and dosed iron, zinc, manganese, iodine and copper.

£1.37 a kilo, sold as six 400g tins, 2.4kg to the pack.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to around 1167 grams a day, or about £1.60, assuming roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is not quite three tins. The one feeding row on the label reads 5000 grams a day for a 5kg dog, which is not a serving anyone could use.