Tails.com Grain-Free Pate review

Where this one settles in our Good band is almost entirely a transparency story. Transparency reads Good, protein and processing does too and nutritional balance reaches Outstanding, and the analysis itself is genuinely good for a wet food. Our scoring cannot reward a recipe whose largest component is named as a category and not as an animal. Wet food does well as a class, so the middle of the shelf sits in our Excellent band. A food that keeps its meat anonymous comes in a band behind that middle, even when the numbers on the back are strong. None of that says anything worrying about what goes into the tray. It is a statement about how much the tray is prepared to tell you.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives, Vegetables* (4% Potato, 4% Peas), Fish and Fish derivatives* (4% salmon), Minerals. *Natural Ingredients

The list runs to four entries and the first of them does the most work. The legal definition of meat and animal derivatives covers the fleshy parts and processing products of warm-blooded land animals. It stretches from prime material to the least glamorous offcuts, and what goes into it can shift between deliveries with no word changing on the tray. Plenty of well-made foods use the term, some of them to protect a recipe they would rather not publish. It still means the animal in your dog's dinner is not written down.

The declared detail sits further down. Potato and peas each appear at 4%, and salmon at 4% inside a fish and fish derivatives entry. Useful fibre and a spread of minerals come with the peas, alongside their starch. Potato is there mainly for body, and the salmon is a small real flourish, nothing more.

The analysis is where this tray does well. Protein converts to 55.6% of dry matter and fat to 27.8%, a properly meat-heavy reading. Estimated carbohydrate lands at 2.7% of dry matter, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. Very little of this tray is starch.

Every entry on the short added panel carries a dose: vitamin D3 at 140.0iu/kg, zinc at 12.0mg/kg, manganese at 1.0mg/kg, copper at 0.5mg/kg and iodine at 0.3mg/kg. A recipe carrying this much animal material draws most of its micronutrition from the ingredients themselves, so a compact panel is not a thin one.

Energy is not declared on the label, so the figure shown here is estimated from the analysis and comes out low even by wet standards. Hold that in mind when you portion it: a light tray means a bigger serving.

It comes in 300 g and 150 g trays, with the smaller tray sold in packs of 8.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would get through roughly 1061 grams a day, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). Because wet food is mostly moisture, that daily weight looks large written down, which is normal for the format.