Webbox Naturals Adult Paté: Paté With Salmon review

All three trays land in our Average band, and the cause is the thin meat description rather than anything troubling in the analysis. Transparency reads Good on the beef and the salmon, with the chicken tray Outstanding. A category term covers any warm blooded animal in any proportion. The mix can change from batch to batch while the printed wording stays exactly the same. Nutritional balance tells a stronger story and reads Outstanding, with protein converting to 50.0% of dry matter and the carbohydrate estimate landing at 6.6%, well under the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. Dogs eat this happily enough and do well on it. Our scoring leans hardest on how much named animal a recipe puts on the table, and that is where these trays give ground.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives, Fish and Fish Derivatives (Salmon 5%), Minerals, Various Sugars.

On paper, meat and animal derivatives is a category defined in law, not a description of the recipe. It covers the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm blooded land animals and anything derived from processing the carcass, which stretches from genuinely good cuts to very ordinary ones without the label having to say which. Some makers use it to protect a formula they do not want copied, and some use it because the contents move with whatever is available. Either way, the fixed point on these trays is the named animal at 5%, and on the chicken tray the meat term itself at 50%.

Various sugars appear on the beef and the salmon lists. Sugar is in dog food to make a bowl more appealing, exactly as it is in ours, and it does nothing to feed the dog. On a list this short it is a noticeable inclusion, and it is one of the reasons the ingredient reading sits where it does.

The chicken tray takes a different route. It swaps the sugars for unnamed cereals and adds derivatives of vegetable origin carrying inulin at 0.1%, a prebiotic fibre usually drawn from chicory that supports the useful bacteria in the gut. That leaves it with three category terms on one label, which is the most vague of the three, and the only declared meat percentage in the range, which is the most open. Both things are true at once.

It is the analysis that behaves itself here. Protein converts to 50.0% of dry matter and fat to 27.8%, with ash at 13.9% and the carbohydrate estimate at just 6.6%. Moisture is declared at 82.0%, high even for a tray, which is why the daily portion runs large. Whatever else the ingredient list leaves out, the macronutrients on offer are reasonable ones for an adult dog.

All three flavours share the same added panel, with a dose against every entry. Vitamin D3 at 250 IU, vitamin E at 15 mg, zinc sulphate at 15 mg, copper sulphate at 1 mg, manganese sulphate at 1 mg and biotin at 20 micrograms per kilo. That is more precision than the ingredient list manages, and it is worth reading as the counterweight to it.

The only tray to bring in fish, with fish and fish derivatives carrying salmon at 5% alongside the land animal meat term that still leads the list. It is also the densest of the three at 86 kcal per 100g, which pulls the daily portion down a little compared with its stablemates.

£5.00 a kilo across all three flavours, in 150g trays sold singly or eleven to a pack.

Take a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition on an allowance of about 840 kcal a day, the standard 110 × bodyweight^0.75 maintenance estimate. Feeding lands between £4.91 and £5.37 a day depending on the flavour, or roughly 982 to 1074 grams.