Caboodle Wet Food: Scrummy sausage hotpot with sweet potato review

All five trays finish inside our Excellent band and within a whisker of one another, so nothing in the range needs avoiding. Every tray reads Outstanding for protein and processing, for nutritional balance and for transparency.

Our scoring is kind to wet food, and the typical adult wet food shares this band. The fair reading is that these trays are a good example of a format that already does well, not an outlier standing above it. What sets them apart from the middle is the meat: one named animal at 60% in every recipe, printed on the front of the list. The estimated carbohydrate is where they vary most, running from 7.5% of dry matter on the beef up to 31.5% on the sausage hotpot, against 15.8% for the category.

Ingredients, as declared: Pork (60%), Broth, Sweet Potato (3%), Beans, Carrot, Peppers, Minerals, Salmon Oil, Kelp.

The opening entry is the same shape on all five labels: one animal, one percentage, 60% of the tray. That is a strong, plainly stated meat share, and because no second species joins it, each recipe is a genuine single meat meal apart from the salmon oil and kelp that follow.

Broth comes second in every list, and it is the one entry that keeps its cards back, since no label says which animal it was made from. In a range this specific elsewhere it stands out, and it is the detail that stops any tray being watertight for a dog with a diagnosed meat allergy.

The vegetables change with the recipe and stay in small printed amounts. Pumpkin, carrot and peas go on the poultry and lamb trays, sweet potato, beans and peppers on the others, and blueberries add a little fruit to two of them. Rice appears only on the chicken and lamb, at 3% where the label gives a figure.

Salmon oil and kelp close every list. Plant oils cannot match the long chain omega 3 fats in the salmon oil. Kelp is the traditional whole food source of iodine and trace minerals. Calcium lands between 0.81% and 1.15% of dry matter across the five, comfortable ground for adult maintenance.

The added panels differ from tray to tray, which is the one place these labels lose their consistency. The chicken and turkey print five entries with doses, vitamin D3 at 200 I.E. per kilo, zinc at 25mg, manganese at 1.4mg, copper at 1mg and iodine at 0.75mg. The lamb and beef print the first three of those, and the pork folds its minerals into the ingredient list without doses. Energy across the range runs from 93 to 148 kcal per 100g, so the trays are not interchangeable spoon for spoon.

Pork at 60% with sweet potato at 3%, beans, carrot and peppers, and no grain at all. Very few dog foods are built on pork. If your dog has reacted to the usual meats, this is a sensible first stop. It also carries the most starch of the five, with estimated carbohydrate at 31.5% of dry matter.

£11.33 a kilo on our estimate, in 150g trays sold in packs of 10 and in a mixed case of 28.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat between 568 and 900 grams a day depending on the recipe. That works out at between £6.43 and £10.20, using maintenance energy of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75). The bottom of that range rests on the chicken tray's declared energy of 148 kcal per 100g, which reads high against its own analysis. Plan for the middle of the range.