Vet's Kitchen Sensitive Care Adult Wet: Ocean Fish with Sweet Potato review

The lamb tray sits in our Excellent band and the ocean fish a step below it in Good. Our scoring treats wet food as a strong category, and the typical adult tray is an Excellent one too. This pair keep company with the middle of the shelf. Transparency reads Outstanding on both, and the lamb reads Excellent where the fish reads Good on protein and processing, on nutritional balance and on value. The lamb earns its edge with a cleaner list where nearly everything is quantified. The fish recipe gives some of that back with an unnamed white fish, a mixed herb entry and a carbohydrate estimate that runs higher still.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon 30%, White Fish 30%, Dried Sweet Potato (1%, equivalent to 4% Sweet Potato), Minerals, Mixed Herbs, Sunflower Oil, Dried Seaweed, Prebiotic Mannan-Oligo- saccharides 0.005%, Glucosamine 0.004%, Chondroitin 0.002%, Yucca Extract, Cranberry Extract, Yeast Extract.

The lamb tray is the tidier of the two lists. Lamb at 60% is the sole animal entry, with sweet potato at 7% and dried peas and dried carrots at 2% each. Then comes a run of small printed extras: spinach and seaweed at 0.15%, mint at 0.1%, rapeseed oil at 0.05%, and chicory root with brewer's yeast at 0.03%. Everything has a number beside it, which is how a recipe aimed at delicate digestions ought to be written.

In the ocean tray that 60% is split evenly, salmon at 30% and white fish at 30%. The salmon is named and the white fish is not, which is common on the wet shelf and rarely matters for a dog with a sensitive stomach rather than a diagnosed allergy. Excluding one particular fish is the one job that entry cannot help with.

The two lists then part company. The lamb finishes with the herb and prebiotic tail Vet's Kitchen uses elsewhere. The fish tray reaches instead for mannan-oligosaccharides at 0.005%, yucca extract, cranberry extract and yeast extract, and takes its added fat from sunflower oil where the lamb uses rapeseed. Mannan-oligosaccharides are the fish tray's prebiotic, doing the job chicory root does in the lamb and encouraging the same gut bacteria.

Neither tray uses cereal. Sweet potato carries the starch, at 7% on the lamb and at 1% dried on the fish, which the label states is the equivalent of 4% before drying. The carbohydrate estimates still read 28.0% and 32.0% of dry matter, and since they are taken by difference they carry everything the analysis leaves unnamed as well as the sweet potato itself.

Fat is where the trays diverge most: 32.0% of dry matter on the lamb against 24.0% on the fish. That makes the lamb the richer bowl for a dog that needs to hold condition and the fish the lighter one for a dog already doing perfectly well. The added panel is dosed in print on both, with vitamin A at 2250 IU, vitamin D3 at 328 IU and vitamin E at 26mg per kilo.

Salmon at 30% and white fish at 30%, with the sweet potato added dried at 1% rather than fresh. It is the lighter tray at 24.0% fat on a dry matter basis and 112 kcal per 100g. Its extras follow a different pattern, with mannan-oligosaccharides, yucca and cranberry standing in for the lamb's chicory root and brewer's yeast.

Both recipes come in at £6.20 a kilo, in 395g trays you can buy singly or in tens.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at around £4.69 a day on the lamb and £4.63 on the ocean fish. That assumes a target of around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to roughly 757 and 747 grams respectively. On the label's own table a dog between 11 and 25kg is given one to two trays a day.