Henley Raw Just 80-10-10: Beef review

All six recipes sit in our Outstanding band and finish level with one another, which is what you would hope for from six trays built to one formula. On our scoring, raw is the hardest company a food can keep, and the middle of that field reaches our Outstanding band as well. Holding that line with a clean, honest single-animal tray says a great deal about how these trays are built. Protein and processing reads Outstanding on all six. Transparency reads Outstanding throughout.

Ingredients, as declared: Ox 30%, Ox Tripe 30%, Ox Heart 20%, Ox Bone 10%, Ox Offal 10%

Four of the six labels are three lines long: the meat at 80%, its bone at 10% and its offal at 10%. That is the whole recipe. Nothing is added for micronutrition, nothing is added for palatability, and the only variable between those four trays is which bird or animal walked into it.

The Beef and the Lamb break that mould by itemising their cuts. The Beef splits into ox, ox tripe, ox heart, ox bone and ox offal, and the Lamb into lamb, lamb tripe, lamb heart, lamb bone and lamb offal. In both cases the animal stays the same throughout, so the single-meat reading holds, and the extra detail tells you rather more about what is actually in the tray.

Tripe is the reason those two trays read differently on the analysis. Crude fibre converts to 11.8% of dry matter on the Beef, far above anything else in the range, which is the stomach lining showing up in the numbers rather than any plant matter. Tripe is easy on the gut and famously popular with fussy dogs. Both are useful things in a single-animal food.

Bone is doing the calcium work in every tray, and yet no calcium percentage appears anywhere. What you can read is crude ash, which converts to between 3.0% and 10.7% of dry matter across the six. That is a very wide spread for recipes sharing one formula, with the poultry trays at the top and the Beef unusually low for a food declaring 10% bone. It is a figure worth checking against whatever else is in your dog's rotation.

The analyses vary more than the shared build suggests. Protein converts to between 38.2% and 63.3% of dry matter and fat to between 28.8% and 46.9%, so the Pork and the Lamb are quite different feeds despite reading almost identically on the label. Carbohydrate stays at 4.2% of dry matter at the very most, against a raw typical of 5.0%, and every energy figure here is an estimate.

The tray that itemises its cuts, with ox at 30%, ox tripe at another 30% and ox heart at 20% ahead of the bone and offal. Tripe pushes crude fibre to 11.8% of dry matter, easily the highest in the range, while protein converts to 38.2%, the lowest of the six. Crude ash reads just 3.0%, which is light for a recipe declaring bone at 10%.

Per kilo, the Chicken is £6.20, the Pork £6.30, the Beef £6.40, the Turkey £6.50, and the Duck and the Lamb are £6.80 each. All six are sold in the same 500 g recyclable and resealable tray.

Take a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition and the standard maintenance estimate of 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75), and feeding runs between £3.27 and £3.52 whichever animal you choose. The six sit close enough on energy that the daily figure barely moves across the range.