Step Up Wet Food Sensitive: Chicken With Fish (24 tins) review

This food sits in our Good band, while the typical wet adult food lands in our Excellent band. The wet category is a strong one, and construction accounts for most of the gap: rice, sweet potato and oats take a larger share of this tin than is usual in a wet recipe. What the label promises, a simple and gentle bowl with its meat declared, it delivers.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (22%), White Fish (14%), Brown Rice (6%), Liver (5%), Sweet Potato (4%), Apple (4%), Peas (4%), Naked Oats (2%), Fish Oil (0.05%), Rosemary, Mint, Minerals

Chicken at 22% leads the list, with white fish at 14% and liver at 5% behind it, and together the animal entries come to 41% of the tin, each with a printed percentage. Protein converts to 35.0% of dry matter, a solid showing for a wet food.

The starch is spread across brown rice at 6%, sweet potato at 4% and naked oats at 2%, with peas at 4% alongside. These are the calm, familiar carriers a sensitive recipe reaches for, though between them the carbohydrate converts to an estimated 30.0% of dry matter, where the typical wet food runs at 15.8%. That is the main reason this reads more like a light casserole than a straight meat tray.

Two entries go unnamed in a way a strict avoidance plan should notice. White fish is a general description with no species behind it, and the liver does not say which animal it comes from. Neither gap troubles a dog whose stomach is simply delicate, with no diagnosed allergy behind it. If your exclusion is aimed at one animal precisely, the label leaves those two doors open.

Apple at 4% with rosemary and mint is the label's flourish, and the fish oil at 0.05% is a token rather than a working dose. The added vitamins and trace elements are each dosed in print, which is more declaration than many wet labels manage.

£2.20 a kilo, sold in 395g tins by the case of 24.

As a guide, feeding works out at around £2.32 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to roughly 1057 grams a day, which is a little under three tins.