Tails.com Pate review

There is a gap between how this tray reads and how it scores, and it sits in our Average band. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding here, while protein and processing comes out Average and transparency Good. Those two share a reason: a recipe whose meat, vegetables and grain are all given as categories leaves less on the label to check. Wet food as a class does well with us, and the shelf's middle lands in our Excellent band, so the distance here is real. What this is not is a poor dinner. The analysis is meat-heavy and light on starch, and a dog eating happily on it is not eating badly.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (including 4% chicken*), Vegetables* (4% Green Beans) Cereals* (2% uncooked Rice equivalent to 5% cooked Rice), Minerals. *Natural Ingredients

Four entries carry the recipe and three of them are written as categories. Meat and animal derivatives can be any warm-blooded land animal in any proportion, vegetables can be any vegetable or legume, and cereals can be any grain. The label pins down one animal, chicken at 4%, one vegetable, green beans at 4%, and one grain, rice at 2% uncooked. Everything else is left to the maker's discretion and can move from batch to batch without the tray changing.

Labelling like this is ordinary right across the wet aisle, and there is no hygiene worry in it. Category terms cover the best material as well as the worst, and some careful makers choose them to keep a recipe private. It does mean you are buying on reputation rather than on the list.

Rice is the one starch declared, at 2% before cooking and 5% after, which is a modest amount by any measure. It is gentle, digestible and about as uncontroversial as grain gets for a dog that tolerates it. Green beans at 4% are equally easy going.

On the analysis, this tray does better than its ingredient list suggests. Protein converts to 55.6% of dry matter and fat to 27.8%, and the estimated carbohydrate comes out at 2.7% of dry matter against the 15.8% that adult wet food usually shows. Whatever the category terms are covering, they are not covering a bowl of starch. Energy is not printed either, so the figure used here is our estimate from the analysis.

Minerals close the list and each addition is dosed in print: zinc at 12.0mg/kg, manganese at 1.0mg/kg, copper at 0.5mg/kg, iodine at 0.3mg/kg and vitamin D3 at 140.0iu/kg. Copper in particular is added to almost every complete food, since ingredients alone rarely land the target consistently.

The tray comes in one size, 150 g, sold in packs of 8.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would work through roughly 1061 grams a day here, on an energy estimate of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is a little over seven trays.