Sainsbury's Nature's Goodness Cans: Beef with Chicken in Jelly review

These tins settle close together, two in our Good band and the smaller turkey tin a step up in Excellent. Our scoring treats wet food kindly, and its typical member sits in Excellent. A Good reading here still means a competent everyday tin. The distance is mostly construction: half of each tin is named meat, and much of the remainder is water, jelly or gravy. Foods finishing above these push the meat share higher and the added water lower. On all three tins, nutritional balance and transparency come back Outstanding. Protein and processing reads Good on two of them and Average on the larger tin. Value keeps step with each tin's own reading: Excellent on the smaller turkey tin, Good on the other two.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef 26%, Chicken 24%, Fruit and Vegetables 8% (from 0.93% Dried Cranberries, Green Beans and Carrot), Minerals, *Sunflower Oil 0.13%, *Salmon Oil 0.06%, *Flaxseed Oil 0.06%, Dried Kelp, Dried Chicory Root 0.02%, Dried Parsley, Plant and Citrus Extracts 0.01%, *Sources of Omega 3 and 6

The animal share is 50% in every tin, either split as beef at 26% with chicken at 24% or handed whole to turkey. Both are honest ways to build a tin, and both are printed, not implied. Protein converts to 42.1% of dry matter on the beef and chicken tin and 45.0% on the turkey, which is a strong reading once the water comes out of the sum.

Fruit and vegetables come in at 8%, rebuilt from 0.93% of dried cranberries, green beans and carrot. Cranberry is the eye-catching name of the three, though at this level all of them are a flourish on the recipe rather than a working amount.

The oils are named and modest: sunflower at 0.13%, salmon at 0.06% and flaxseed at 0.06% on the 390g tins. Between the salmon and the flaxseed there is a little omega 3 in the bowl, and the salmon oil is the entry a strict fish-free plan has to notice.

The larger turkey tin is the odd one out behind the meat. It brings in potato starch as a carrier, declares its vegetables at 0.6% dried and its fruit at 0.35% dried, and then adds caramelised sugar and D-Xylose, both sugars, along with yucca powder. All three are down at the bottom where the quantities are tiny, and they are the one part of an otherwise plain label that the recipe could do without.

The added panel is dosed in print across the range, covering calcium, vitamin A, vitamin D3, vitamin E, zinc, iron and manganese, with copper joining on the larger turkey tin. Printed figures on a supermarket wet label are more than plenty of tins offer.

Beef at 26% and chicken at 24% set in jelly, the only tin in the range to run two animals together. It is also the wettest at 81.0% moisture and the lightest on energy at an estimated 81 kcal per 100g, so portions run largest here. Its carbohydrate estimate of 15.8% of dry matter lands exactly on the typical figure for adult wet food.

The 390g tins are £3.46 a kilo and the turkey sold as 6 x 400g is £2.92 a kilo.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £2.76 and £3.59 a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is roughly 944 to 1037 grams a day, or between two and three tins.