Wainwright's Mature Pouches: Chicken with Brown Rice review

Both pouches finish in our Good band, one step behind the typical adult wet food, which lands in Excellent. A Good placing here says how the pouch is put together, and it carries no caution about feeding it. Wet food scores well with us as a category.

Chicken or tuna at 42% is the largest single entry, but brown rice at 10%, dried peas at 4% and carrots at 4% take a meaningful share between them. Once the water is out of the sum, carbohydrate converts to an estimated 25.7% of dry matter on the chicken and 24.0% on the tuna. For the typical adult wet food that figure is 15.8%. The joint ingredients are declared with figures, which is more than many senior foods manage, and those figures are small.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (42%), Cooked Wholegrain Brown Rice (10%), Dried Peas (4%), Carrots (4%), Minerals, Olive Oil (0.3%), Seaweed Extract (0.2%), Chicory Extract (as a source of Prebiotic Fructo-oligosaccharides) (0.1%), Yucca Extract (0.05%), Glucosamine (0.005%), Blueberry Powder, Cranberry Extract, Pomegranate Extract, Chondroitin (0.0015%)

Chicken at 42% on one pouch, tuna at 42% on the other, and in each case the named animal is the only one in the recipe. Chicken is the easiest meat to find and one of the easiest to digest. Reports of intolerance are more common than for less widely used meats, simply because dogs meet it so often. The tuna pouch runs much higher in protein, converting to 54.3% of dry matter against 35.7% on the chicken.

The starch is cooked wholegrain brown rice at 10%. Cooking it before it goes into the pouch helps digestibility, and keeping it wholegrain brings fibre and B vitamins that a refined rice would have lost. Dried peas at 4% and carrots at 4% follow, both useful and both named with an amount beside them.

Glucosamine at 0.005% and chondroitin at 0.0015% are the mature additions. Both turn up naturally in meat and cartilage, so any meat-based food carries traces of them, and these declared amounts are modest. Treat them as a small helping hand, not a course of treatment. If a joint problem has been diagnosed, keep the dog on whatever the vet has prescribed.

Olive oil, seaweed extract, chicory extract and yucca extract fill the tail at 0.3% or less, with the tuna pouch adding sunflower oil at 1.7%. Olive oil is a genuinely good inclusion for coat and heart. Chicory works as a prebiotic, feeding what already lives in the gut, and seaweed brings iodine. Blueberry powder closes both lists, with cranberry and pomegranate extracts, all without amounts.

Both labels dose their added panel in print. The chicken pouch declares vitamin A at 1675IU, vitamin D3 at 190IU and vitamin E at 50mg, with zinc at 32.6mg the largest of the trace elements. The tuna pouch declares vitamin A at 1450IU and vitamin E at 40mg, with no vitamin D3 listed beside them. It is a plain difference between the two labels and one to know about if the tuna is the pouch you feed.

Chicken at 42% with brown rice behind it, the richer pouch on fat at 28.6% of dry matter and the denser on energy at an estimated 96 kcal per 100g. It is also the pouch whose vitamin list runs to three entries rather than two.

£6.08 a kilo. Both flavours come as 150g pouches in a case of 16.

On the energy maths, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The chicken pouch meets that in roughly 873 grams at £5.31 a day, and the tuna in roughly 949 grams at £5.77. The label's own guide for a dog of 12kg to 25kg is 600 to 1050 grams a day on the chicken and 675 to 1200 grams on the tuna.