Boost Working Dog Trays: Chicken with Superfoods review

Neither tray outranks the other, and the difference is simply the amount of fuel your dog gets through. Both reach our Outstanding band. That is the same band the typical fresh food occupies, which makes it a genuinely competitive result in the strongest field we cover.

Every pillar reads Outstanding on each recipe, value included, and the carbohydrate figures are a large part of why they sit so high. At 9.6% of dry matter on the Chicken and 3.3% on the Turkey, almost everything in these trays is doing nutritional work. The joint supplements and the oils are not merely named: each carries a printed dose to one decimal place.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 70%, Carrot 5%, Potato 5%, Broccoli 5%, Potato Starch, Linseed oil (0.5%), Fish oil (0.5%), Glucosamine (0.3%), Minerals, Chicory powder (0.1%), Chondroitin Sulphate (0.1%)

A 70% meat headline is the same figure the brand's standard trays carry, but here the label names the species and stops there. No breakdown into cuts. What changes is everything around it. Where the ordinary trays spread their plants across several entries, these keep to carrot, potato and broccoli at 5% each, with a little potato starch behind them. The difference shows up very plainly in the analysis.

The Turkey is the more concentrated of the two by some distance, declaring 14.0% fat as fed against the Chicken's 9.0%. That converts to 46.7% and 34.6% of dry matter and lands at 171 and 134 kcal per 100g. Fat is the fuel a working dog actually runs on, and that gap is deliberate. It is also why a dog on light duties wants a smaller bowl of the Turkey than the label's upper figure.

Carbohydrate is where these labels stand apart. The Chicken estimates 2.5% as fed and the Turkey just 1.0%, converting to 9.6% and 3.3% of dry matter. Potato starch is here as a binder, and the plant entries are whole vegetables that bring fibre and antioxidants of their own.

Glucosamine at 0.3% and chondroitin sulphate at 0.1% appear on both labels with figures attached. In a food aimed at dogs putting real mileage through their joints, that is a sensible inclusion. Glucosamine is thought to slow the breakdown of cartilage and chondroitin to calm the inflammation around it. Trial results have been mixed, but a declared level tells you far more than a name on a list ever could.

Linseed oil and fish oil sit at 0.5% each, covering both the plant and the marine forms of omega 3, and chicory powder at 0.1% brings inulin for the gut. The mineral panel is declared per kilo, with vitamin D3 at 200 IU, vitamin E at 50 mg, zinc at 15 mg, manganese at 10.0 mg, copper at 2.0 mg and iodine at 0.5 mg.

Chicken at 70% on carrot, potato and broccoli. It is the gentler of the pair at 134 kcal per 100g, with fat converting to 34.6% of dry matter. That makes it the everyday option for a dog that works hard some days and rests on the others.

Both recipes work out at £7.32 a kilo. The trays are 400g, sold singly or in a multipack of 7.

As a guide, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75 puts a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition at around 840 kcal a day. The Chicken then works out at about 627 grams a day, the Turkey at about 491 grams. That comes to roughly £4.59 a day on the Chicken and £3.60 on the Turkey, the difference following the Turkey's higher energy density. A dog genuinely at work will need more than that estimate allows for.