Edgard & Cooper Senior Trays review

Our Excellent band is where this pot finishes. An Excellent is the ordinary result for a wet food with us, because the category scores well across the board. Read this as a recipe meeting the standard of its shelf and being honest about how it does it. The strength is in what is named: two animals with printed percentages, no meat and animal derivatives, no unnamed oil, and an estimated carbohydrate share well under the wet average. The additive panel is what holds it back. Three trace minerals are printed and nothing else.

Ingredients, as declared: chicken 42%, salmon 14%, minerals, peas 2%, sweet potato 1%, pumpkin 1%, broccoli 1%, cranberries 1%, parsley 0.1%, dill 0.1%

Chicken at 42% and salmon at 14% open the composition, which is 56% of the pot from two named animals with nothing vague standing behind them. Protein converts to 50.0% of dry matter and fat to 27.8%. Wet food seldom reads that rich, and an older dog who still eats with enthusiasm will do well on it.

The plant side is small and fully printed: peas at 2%, then sweet potato, pumpkin, broccoli and cranberries at 1% each, with parsley and dill at 0.1%. Estimated carbohydrate converts to 8.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%, so almost nothing in this pot is there to bulk it out.

Moisture is declared at 82%, which is the pot doing its job. A high water content is what wet food is for, and for an older dog who has stopped drinking as much as they used to it is a quiet advantage at every meal.

The thinnest part of the label is the additive panel: zinc at 15.2 mg, manganese at 3.2 mg and iodine at 0.5 mg, with no vitamins listed beside them. A good deal of micronutrition comes from the meat itself. If these pots are your dog's whole diet and not half of it, the maker is the right person to ask about the vitamin picture.

£9.39 a kilo, in 150 g pots sold singly and in packs of 11.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat roughly 994 grams a day, and that comes to about £9.33. The working assumption is about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's guide stops at 10 kg, where it asks for 630 grams a day.