Lily's Kitchen Lily Kitchen Vibrant Rainbow Stew review

Our scoring leans hard on named animal protein, and this tray has none of it by design, which is why it comes out in our Average band. The pillars underneath tell you the rest: transparency reads Outstanding, nutritional balance Average and protein and processing Poor. That is the difference between a food that is badly made and a food built to a brief the scoring was not written for. This one is the second.

So judge it on its own brief. Judged as a plant based tray with every ingredient named and the leading ones counted, it succeeds. The maker behind it has a long record of taking recipes seriously. As a general purpose adult dinner it asks more of you. The protein is thinner than a meat tray's and the starch a good deal heavier, and a dog fed on it alone is relying on the plant side to cover everything.

Ingredients, as declared: Potatoes (10%), Courgettes (6%), Carrots (6%), Millet (6%), Lupin, Lentils (3%), Peas, Pea Protein, Sunflower Seeds, Sunflower Oil, Minerals, Yeast, Chia Seeds, Algae, Parsley, Basil, Goldenrod, Nettles, Aniseed, Rosehips, Marigold Flowers, Cleavers, Chickweed, Alfalfa, Milk Thistle, Dandelion Root, Burdock Root, Celery Seeds.

The defining fact is the absence. There is no meat, no fish and no egg on this list, and nothing that reads as an animal derivative either. Everything in the tray comes from vegetables, pulses, seeds, algae and yeast. That is a deliberate design and not an omission, and it is the whole reason to consider the tray in the first place.

The starch comes from several directions at once. Potatoes at 10% lead, millet at 6% follows, and lentils at 3% and peas add more behind them. Millet is the friendlier of the grains. It has no gluten in it and most dogs digest it without fuss, and lentils have been alongside dogs for as long as people have grown them. Between them they put carbohydrate at an estimated 45.7% of dry matter, which is where a plant based recipe inevitably lands.

Protein is the harder problem for a meat free tray, and this one spreads the load across lupin, lentils, peas, pea protein, sunflower seeds, chia seeds, algae and yeast. Whole pulses and seeds are decent contributors. Pea protein is a refined by-product of pea processing, not a whole food. Vegetable proteins are generally less digestible for a dog, and they carry a less complete set of amino acids than meat does. The 23.1% of dry matter on the analysis is therefore doing less work than the same figure would from a meat tray.

The vegetables themselves are good ones. Courgettes and carrots at 6% each are declared with percentages, and the carrots bring vitamin A and antioxidants as well as soluble fibre. The fat comes from sunflower seeds and sunflower oil, and the oil is naturally rich in vitamin E with little saturated fat in it.

Then there is the herbal tail, and it is a long one: parsley, basil, goldenrod, nettles, aniseed, rosehips, marigold flowers, cleavers, chickweed, alfalfa, milk thistle, dandelion root, burdock root and celery seeds. This is the house style, and every one of those sits at trace level: character, not a reason to buy.

Minerals are declared in the list. No dosed vitamin panel comes to us with this label, which is the one gap worth closing on the pack before you commit to feeding it as a whole diet. On the analysis, protein is 6.0% and fat 4.2% as fed against 74.0% moisture, and the tray runs at 99 kcal per 100g, close to the 97 typical for adult wet food.

£9.50 a kilo, in a single 400 g tray.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat roughly 848 grams a day, which comes to about £8.06. That takes about 840 kcal a day as the maintenance figure (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).