Ziwi Peak Tins: Beef review

All four recipes read Outstanding on our scoring, with next to nothing between them. The wet shelf is a strong category whose middle already reaches our Excellent band, so this range sits a step clear of the better part of it. The reasons are on the tin: two thirds of each recipe is a named animal with its organs listed out, there is a single starch, and no entry is written as a legal category.

Ingredients, as declared: 65% Beef and Beef Organs (including Beef, Lung, Kidney, Tripe, Liver, Bone, Cartilage), Chickpeas, 3% New Zealand Green Mussel, Lecithin, Minerals, Dried Kelp

Every tin is put together the same way. A named animal with its organs takes the front, 65% on the Beef and the Venison, 66% on the Chicken, while the Mackerel and Lamb splits its front end 39% fish to 26% lamb. The organs are listed one by one, so you can see the lung, kidney, tripe, liver, heart and bone going in. That is the point of a whole prey recipe, and very few labels bother to spell it out.

Nothing in an animal is more nutrient dense than its organs, liver especially, and tripe is among the easiest things for a dog to digest. The bone and cartilage in the mix are where much of the mineral content comes from, which is exactly why a recipe like this does not need a long added panel behind it.

Chickpeas are the only starch and they carry no percentage, which is the one real gap in these lists. The estimated carbohydrate gives you a sense of the size of it. The Chicken sits at 6.8% of dry matter and the Beef at 16.3%, against the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. Whichever tin you pick, this is a low starch bowl by wet food standards.

At 3%, the New Zealand green mussel is in there in earnest, not as a token sprinkle. It is the ingredient owners of older dogs tend to go looking for. Dried kelp closes each list and brings iodine with it, which is useful given how short the added panel is.

The analysis is strong across the board. Protein converts to between 40.9% and 55.1% of dry matter, with the Mackerel and Lamb and the Venison at the top of that spread, and fat runs from 22.4% to 28.6%. The Chicken tin is the outlier, with ash at 18.2% of dry matter, high enough to suggest a more generous share of bone in that particular recipe than in its siblings.

The added panel is brief, and every trace element in it is chelated. Zinc, copper, iron and manganese are bound to protein or glycine, not supplied as plain sulphates, and that is the form a dog takes up most readily. Vitamin D3 sits alongside them. With this much organ meat and bone in the tin, a short added panel reads as confidence in the ingredients.

Beef and beef organs at 65%, the list running through lung, kidney, tripe, liver, bone and cartilage. It is the richest of the four in fat at 28.6% of dry matter and the highest in estimated carbohydrate at 16.3%, and lecithin appears here where the Chicken does without it.

Sold in 170g and 390g tins, both by the case of 12, with the same recipe inside either size.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets through 672 to 700 grams a day, depending on the recipe. That comes off an estimate of 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). These are dense tins for wet food, so that works out at a little under two of the 390g size a day, or about four of the 170g.