Orlando Gourmet Grain Free Trays: Chicken & Turkey review

The adult wet shelf has a high midpoint on our scoring, and these trays land right on it, inside our Excellent band. All three finish together, and what your dog enjoys decides between them rather than any difference in quality. What carries them is the front of the label: a 60% meat declaration, a plant side that stops at 5%, and enough salmon oil and chicory to be worth naming and dosing. Transparency reads Outstanding across the three and protein and processing reads Good, with nutritional balance reaching Excellent on all but the beef tray.

Ingredients, as declared: 60% Chicken & Turkey (Including 4% Freshly Prepared Turkey), Vegetables 5% (Potato, Dried Peas, Dried Carrot), Minerals, Salmon Oil 0.4%, Beet Pulp, Chicory Extract 1500mg/kg.

Sixty per cent of each tray is declared as meat, and the trays differ in how that share is split. The chicken tray gives the whole of it to one animal. The other two combine chicken with a second meat and put a figure only on the newcomer, 4% freshly prepared beef on one and 4% freshly prepared turkey on the other. The chicken proportion is left unstated.

Small and named is what the plant side is: vegetables at 5%, made up of potato plus dried peas and dried carrot. Beet pulp sits behind them carrying fibre. The grain free claim on the front holds up when you read the back, because no cereal appears anywhere.

At 0.4%, the salmon oil is a working amount and not a token. It is also what puts fish on all three trays. Chicory extract is declared at 1500mg/kg, a prebiotic dose you can actually check. Most wet labels do not bother to offer one.

The analysis is rich. Protein converts to 33.3% of dry matter on the chicken and the chicken with turkey trays and 31.5% on the chicken with beef, while fat converts to 37.0% and 35.2%. Carbohydrate is estimated at 14.9% of dry matter on two of the three and 18.5% on the chicken with beef, either side of the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. At 140 kcal per 100g against a typical 97, these are dense trays and portions run correspondingly smaller.

The added panel is dosed line by line, running from vitamins A and D3 through vitamin E to zinc and manganese, then iodine, with selenium at the end, each carrying a figure per kilo. Selenium arrives as sodium selenite. Of the two forms Europe permits, this is the commoner one and the usual choice across this part of the shelf. The other is organic.

Turkey is the second meat, with 4% declared as freshly prepared turkey inside the 60% share. Its analysis matches the chicken tray line for line. Energy is the difference: 130 kcal per 100g, an estimate of ours where the other two declare theirs, so portions run a touch larger.

Sold in 395g trays.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat roughly 600 grams a day of the chicken or the chicken with beef tray, and roughly 644 grams of the chicken with turkey. The 840 kcal a day behind those figures comes from 110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate. That is a little over one and a half trays, a smaller daily amount than most wet foods call for.