Sainsbury's Nature's Goodness Pate 150g: Chicken review

Both tubs finish in our Excellent band, level with each other. The typical adult wet food is an Excellent too, so this pate keeps company with the middle of a strong category while doing it on ten ingredients. Protein and processing reads Good, nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding, and value Excellent alongside the overall. The reasons are in plain sight: a named animal at 60%, protein at 50.0% of dry matter, and a label with almost nothing on it needing explanation.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken* (60%), Carrot* (3%), Potato* (2%), Minerals, Chicory Root* (0.08%), Cranberry Powder*, Rosemary Powder*, Spinach Powder,* Dried Parsley,* Blueberry Powder*. *Natural ingredients

Sixty per cent of each tub is the named animal, and that is the whole plot of the recipe. Protein converts to 50.0% of dry matter and fat to 27.5%, a genuinely meat-led analysis, and the carbohydrate estimate lands at 7.5% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%.

Carrot at 3% and potato at 2% are the only plants with any weight behind them. Cooked carrot is easily digested and brings the pigment a dog turns into vitamin A along with a little soluble fibre, while the potato is largely there to give the pate its body.

Chicory root at 0.08% is the functional entry. Its inulin is a soluble fibre that gut bacteria live on. Blueberry, cranberry, spinach, parsley and rosemary follow as trace amounts. The rosemary also works as a natural antioxidant and slows the fat in the tub going stale.

Every entry on the short added panel carries a dose: vitamin D3, vitamin E, zinc, manganese, copper and iodine. There is no vitamin A and no added iron, both of which a meat-rich recipe carries a good deal of in the meat itself. It does leave this one of the shorter panels you will read on a wet label.

What is absent matters as much as what is there. No fish oil, no unnamed fats, no hydrolysates and no category terms, which means the beef tub really is a one-animal recipe and so is the chicken. That kind of clarity is unusual on a supermarket label and it is the strongest single reason to consider this pate.

Chicken at 60% standing in for the beef, on the same construction and the same analysis. More dogs in this country are fed chicken than any other meat, and chicken is also the one they most often cannot take. For most dogs it is the obvious first choice, and for a few it is the obvious one to step around.

£6.00 a kilo, in a 150g tub, with the same figure on the beef and the chicken.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at £5.48 a day, or roughly 913 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for a dog between 10kg and 30kg runs from 750g to 1950g a day.