Butchers Traditional Recipes Foil: With Beef and Vegetables review

All three trays share a single placement in our Excellent band, so choosing between them is a question of which meat your dog enjoys rather than which recipe is better built. The middle of the wet field lands in the same place, and wet scores strongly with us as a category. This range keeps step with the shelf.

The printed percentages are what carry it. Adding up the named animals gives 65% of each tray, and protein converts to 44.4% of dry matter with fat at 27.8%. Estimated carbohydrate lands at 15.6% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. Nutritional balance and transparency come back Outstanding on all three trays, and value reads Excellent across the trio. Protein and processing reads Good, with the beef a step ahead at Excellent, so everything is done solidly and nothing showily.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 39%, Beef (Including Beef Broth) 26%, Carrots 3%, Peas 1.5%, Salmon Oil, Plant Fibres, Vitamins & Minerals, Chicory Root, MOS.

Chicken is the first entry on every tray, which is worth noticing when the front of the pack says beef, lamb or turkey. The flavour animal follows at 26% with its own broth counted inside that figure, so the liquid in the tray is meat stock, not plain water. Together the named animals come to 65% of the recipe, all of it printed.

Nothing cereal based appears anywhere. The vegetables are named, and never above 4% in any tray, which is why the estimated carbohydrate stays modest for a food of this kind. The rest of the roughage comes from plant fibres, and the label never says which plant.

Chicory root and MOS close each list. Both are there with the gut in mind, chicory bringing inulin as a soluble fibre and MOS coming from yeast cell walls. Both sit at the trace end of the list, well short of working doses. No percentage is given for the salmon oil, so treat it as a useful addition and not a measured omega 3 supplement.

Every entry in the short added panel carries a dose: vitamin A at 1250 I.U. per kilo, vitamin D3 at 250 I.U., vitamin E at 13mg, with zinc at 20mg, manganese at 2.5mg and iodine at 0.5mg. Ash converts to 11.1% of dry matter, which tells you the minerals are present in normal quantity, though no calcium figure is printed.

Chicken at 39% with beef and beef broth at 26%, the highest chicken share in the range. It is also the only tray to put two vegetables in together, carrots at 3% and peas at 1.5%.

£3.61 a kilo. Each tray is 150g, and packs hold 12 or 24.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats around 955 grams a day, which comes to about £3.45, working from a maintenance estimate of roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75). The label's own chart puts a dog of 10 to 20 kg on 675 to 900 grams a day, so the energy based figure sits a little above the top of it.