Earls Meaty Selection Trays: With Chicken, Ham & Vegetables review

The lamb and kidney tray reads the strongest of the four and settles in our Good band, with the other three a step back in Average. A typical adult wet food reaches our Excellent band, and the distance between them is almost entirely a labelling story. A recipe that calls 48% of itself meat and animal derivatives, then names only a slice of that, gives our scoring very little to credit. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding on all four. Protein and processing runs from Good on the lamb tray down to Poor on the chicken and the turkey, and transparency from Outstanding on the beef and chicken trays to Good on the lamb. What the analysis does show is genuinely decent, and plenty of dogs eat this every day and do very well on it.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives 48% (Including 15% Chicken, 5% Ham), Vegetables (4% Carrots), Minerals, Antioxidants.

Meat and animal derivatives is a legal term, and it means the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals plus what comes out of processing their carcasses. The term is deliberately wide, holding anything from prime material to the very ordinary. One batch can differ from the next with no change to the printed label. What Earls does do is name part of the total on each tray. Beef at 15% with chicken at 15%, chicken at 15% with ham at 5%, lamb at 18% with kidney at 10%, or turkey at 8% with game at 6%. That is more than many cartons in this part of the shelf bother to declare.

The analysis is the pleasant surprise. Protein sits at 8.0% as fed, which converts to 47.1% of dry matter on the beef and chicken trays and 40.0% on the other two, and fat converts to between 25.0% and 29.4%. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 10.5% on two of the four and 20.0% on the others, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. No tray here leans on starch to fill itself out.

These are light trays, at 77 kcal per 100g on the beef and chicken recipes and an estimated 84 kcal on the lamb and turkey ones. Moisture runs from 80.0% to 83.0%, which is what wet food is, and it means daily portions look large next to anything fed from a scoop.

The added panel is identical on all four cartons and every entry carries a dose. Vitamin A at 1250 iu, vitamin D3 at 250 iu, vitamin E at 13 mg, zinc at 55.6 mg, manganese at 2.5 mg and iodine at 0.79 mg. Three of the lists finish with antioxidants that are not named, which is common practice and is the one place the label could easily have said more.

Chicken at 15% with ham at 5% and carrots at 4%. The ham puts pork on this label, worth knowing for a household steering around it. No other tray in the range carries a cured meat.

£2.49 a kilo, sold as a 150 g tray in a carton of 12.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £2.48 and £2.72 a day, or roughly 994 to 1091 grams. Those figures assume about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). A gram of wet food holds very few calories. Those portions run large as a result, and plenty of households serve trays like these alongside a dry food.