Edgard & Cooper Adult Cups: Chicken & Turkey review

Four of the five pots take our Excellent band, and the Game & Duck finishes just behind them in Good. That is a narrow spread for a range that shares one construction from pot to pot. Wet food does well on our scoring, and the typical adult wet food is itself an Excellent. These pots keep company with the better wet recipes without standing apart from them. What lifts them is the naming and the restraint: two animals with printed figures, no category terms, and an estimated carbohydrate share that stays well under what wet food usually carries.

Ingredients, as declared: chicken 30%, turkey 26%, minerals, carrot 2%, cranberries 1%, tomato 1%, pumpkin 1%, apple 1%, parsley 0.1%, dill 0.1%

The meat is the whole point here. Every recipe opens with two named animals whose percentages come to 56% of the pot, and there is no meat and animal derivatives entry, no unnamed fat and no hydrolysate anywhere across the five labels. For food served from a pot, 50.0% of dry matter is a genuinely meat-led protein reading.

Behind the meat sits a short parade of produce, each entry printed with its own figure and none above 2%. Carrot does most of the work, with beetroot, broccoli, apple, cranberries, pumpkin, spinach, tomato and sweet potato appearing according to the recipe, and parsley and dill closing every list at 0.1%. They season the pot and that is all they are meant to do.

What the label does not spell out is the water. The printed percentages account for the meat and the produce, moisture is declared at 82%, and most of the rest of the pot is the liquid the meat is cooked in. That is simply what wet food is, and it is why the estimated carbohydrate converts to only 8.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%.

No oil of any kind is added, so the 5.0% fat comes from the meat itself and converts to 27.8% of dry matter. That keeps the list refreshingly short, and it means a dog reacting to added fish or vegetable oils has one less thing to react to here.

Minerals appear as a single collective entry in the composition and are then broken out in the additive panel with a dose against each. Four pots share the same panel, running vitamin D3 at 140 IU through zinc, manganese, copper and iodine. The Salmon & Turkey is the exception, using chelated zinc at 15.2 mg and chelated manganese at 3 mg with iodine at 0.5 mg, and printing no vitamin D3 at all.

Chicken at 30% and turkey at 26%, the most evenly balanced poultry pot, with tomato, pumpkin, apple and cranberries behind them. It lands in our Excellent band with most of the range, the spread across these pots being a matter of a whisker rather than of kind.

Four of the five recipes are £7.87 a kilo and the Beef & Duck is £9.39 a kilo. The pots come in 150 g and 300 g, the smaller size also sold in an 11 pack and the larger in an 18 pack. The Beef & Duck is offered in the 150 g size only.

As a guide, take a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition at about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at between £7.78 and £7.82 a day on those four recipes and £9.33 a day on the Beef & Duck. That is roughly 988 to 994 grams a day.