Platinum Menu Puppy review

Our Outstanding band is where this lands, a rung up from the typical wet puppy food, which is already good company to keep. It clears the typical mark by a distance, carried by nutritional balance at Outstanding and protein and processing at Excellent. Transparency reads Outstanding as well.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken meat (84 %), salmon oil, dehydrated vegetables (broccoli, carrots, leek), olive oil.

Chicken meat at 84% is very nearly the whole recipe, and everything after it is oil or vegetable. Lists this short are rare in wet food, because most makers reach for a gelling agent or a starch to hold the texture. Doing without both is the single most interesting decision on this label.

Chicken is also the only animal on it. A pup kept to one meat has a real option here. The honest caveat is the salmon oil, which matters if your household avoids fish outright.

The two oils divide the work sensibly. A growing brain and retina both draw on long chain omega 3 fats, supplied here by the salmon oil. Olive oil adds monounsaturated fat with vitamin E and antioxidants alongside. Between them they lift declared fat to 11.0%.

The vegetables are dehydrated and named individually, broccoli, carrot and leek, with no combined share printed. At that level they are fibre and micronutrients rather than bulk, and carrot in particular carries the beta carotene a young dog uses for vision.

The analysis is where the shortness of the list shows through. Protein of 15.5% converts to 51.7% of dry matter and fat of 11.0% to 36.7%, while the carbohydrate estimate lands at 4.3% of dry matter against the 13.6% typical of a wet puppy food. There is almost no starch in this tray, and the numbers say so plainly.

Energy is the other outlier. At 166 kcal per 100g against 106 typical of wet puppy food, this feeds in noticeably smaller servings than a standard tray. That suits a small pup with little room in the stomach, and it means keeping a careful eye on a greedy one.

Calcium comes out at 1.67% of dry matter, ahead of what large and giant breed growth plans are normally built around. Take that figure to your vet if a big pup is on the way. The added panel is brief: vitamin D3 at 480 IU, vitamin E at 60 mg, and copper, zinc and selenium as the named trace elements.

Sold as 90g, 185g and 375g trays, in multipacks running from 12 up to 72.

Our standard energy estimate puts a 10kg pup between 4 and 12 months at roughly 426 to 521 grams a day. The density of this food is what keeps that figure lower than most trays ask for.

The sums change every few weeks as a pup grows. Set the tray count by their weight on the day and by what you can feel along their ribs, and never let a routine fixed at the start decide it.