Butternut Box: Gobble Gobble Turkey review

Ten of the eleven recipes reach our Outstanding band and Salmon to Love settles just under them in our Excellent band, a step rather than a gulf. Beef It Up leads the range on our reading, nutritional balance returns Outstanding on all eleven, and protein and processing joins it there on every recipe bar the Salmon.

No category scores higher with us than fresh, and the typical fresh food sits in our Outstanding band too. A range this consistent across eleven separate labels is doing well in quick company. The Game carries a 50% meat share against the 60% the other ten declare, and with its very light fat figure alongside that it still holds a place in our Outstanding band. It remains a well-built meal and a genuinely unusual one.

Ingredients, as declared: Human-Quality Turkey 60% (Turkey, Turkey Liver, Turkey Hearts), Carrots (14%), Sweet Potatoes (4%), Peas (4%), Split Red Lentils (4%), Whole Red Lentils (4%), Broccoli (3%), Spinach (2%), Cauliflower (2%), Brewer's Yeast, Minerals, Ground Flaxseed, Dried Algae, Dried Rosemary.

The meat share is 60% on ten of the eleven recipes and 50% on You've Got Game, and Butternut opens it up on most labels. Beef It Up itemises beef with ox heart and ox liver, and Chicken You Out lists chicken alongside its liver and heart. Wham Bam Lamb declares a minimum 26% lamb with lamb heart and liver behind it. Heart and liver are the most nutrient-dense parts of an animal, and seeing them by name, not under a by-product heading, is the mark of a label written to be read.

Human-Quality is Butternut's own phrase, not a legal category, so it points at how the meat is sourced and not at a regulated standard. What can be checked sits on the list itself. Every animal is named to species, and no unnamed meat or unnamed fat appears anywhere across the eleven recipes. Where two species share a bowl, the label gives each of them a minimum percentage.

Carrot is the constant, leading the plant side on nearly every recipe and reaching 14.5% in Wham Bam Lamb. Behind it come red lentils in both split and whole form, sweet potato, cauliflower, broccoli, green beans and squash, all named and most carrying a percentage on the pouch labels. Split lentils cook down and thicken the meal while whole ones hold their shape and their fibre, which is why several recipes use the two together.

Three of the eleven bring a grain in deliberately. The Duo of Chicken with Salmon uses wholegrain rice, and Pork of the Town and Tuck in Chicken both use whole pearl barley with quinoa. A whole grain in a gently cooked meal is a very different proposition from refined cereal flour in a biscuit, arriving with its fibre and B vitamins intact. For anyone avoiding grain, the other eight recipes leave it off altogether.

Added fat is deliberately light across the range. Ground flaxseed appears on most labels for plant omega 3, and sunflower oil at 0.5% turns up in Beef It Up and Wham Bam Lamb. Salmon oil sits in the Duo of Duck and Chicken, and dried algae carries the omega 3 in Chicken You Out and Gobble Gobble Turkey. That is how those two supply the long-chain fatty acids without a fish oil on the label. Fat as fed runs from 3.5% on You've Got Game up to 10.0% on Beef It Up and Wham Bam Lamb.

The added panel is unusually well specified. Zinc, iron, manganese and copper all arrive as chelates, minerals bound to protein fragments or amino acids, a form generally absorbed more readily than plain sulphates. Beef It Up and Wham Bam Lamb add selenium in an organic yeast-grown form. The one consequence worth knowing is that a chelate of protein hydrolysates is still protein of unstated origin. A truly strict elimination trial has to account for it even on a recipe that names a single animal.

These are water-rich meals, with declared moisture between 69.0% and 74.0%, and the energy figures on our tables are estimates, not declared values. On a dry matter basis protein runs from 35.5% up to 46.4% and fat from 13.5% to 33.3%. That is a wide spread and a real one, the Game being a genuinely light meal and Beef It Up a genuinely rich one. The daily amount moves a long way between recipes.

Turkey at 60% as turkey, turkey liver and turkey hearts, with carrots at 14% the biggest single vegetable share on any pouch label bar the Lamb. Like Chicken You Out it leans on dried algae in place of a fish oil, and turkey is the leaner bird, giving one of the gentler analyses in the range at 5.5% fat as fed.

£6.75 a kilo where a figure is published, which covers six of the eleven recipes. Five recipes list pouch sizes of 125g, 200g, 300g and 400g, while the rest ship in pre-portioned frozen pouches sized to your dog's plan, not to a fixed pack.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets through between 560 and 855 grams a day, the figure moving with the recipe. The basis is about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. The six recipes carrying a published figure run from around £4.06 a day on the Duo of Duck and Chicken to around £5.77 a day on You've Got Game. The spread follows how light or how rich each meal is.