Step Up Wet Food Adult Trays: Big Love Beefy Stew review

The beef and chicken trays finish in our Excellent band and the salmon tray in Good, a wider spread than a range this consistent usually shows. The reason is readable on the label rather than buried in the analysis. Beef and chicken each lead with a named animal at a high printed percentage. The salmon tray splits its fish between named salmon and an unnamed white fish, which is what keeps it a shade behind the other two. Measured against the wet category, whose middle sits in Excellent, two of these are right in the thick of it and the third is a short step behind.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef (45%), Chicken (16%), Rice (6%), Dried White Potato (1%, equivalent to 5% White Potato), Dried Peas (1%, equivalent to 4% Peas), Naked Oats (2%), Minerals, Fish Oil (0.05%), Rosemary (0.03%)

Each tray leads with its meat and prints the figure beside it. The beef is 45% with chicken at 16% behind it. The chicken tray is 62% chicken alone. The salmon tray is 33% salmon with white fish at 27%. A percentage on every animal entry is not a given on the wet shelf, and it is the most useful thing these labels do.

The plant side is the same everywhere and it is small. Rice comes in at 6%, naked oats at 2% and dried potato at 1%, which the label helpfully translates into 5% of the fresh vegetable. The beef and salmon trays add dried peas on that same basis and the chicken tray adds dried carrots. Once the moisture is out, carbohydrate lands between 18.0% and 24.0% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. The grain is doing a shade more work here than it does across the category.

Protein converts to 36.0% of dry matter on all three, with fat at 32.0% on the beef and salmon and 28.0% on the chicken. Those are healthy numbers for a wet dinner, and they are built from a declared moisture figure rather than an assumed one.

Fish oil appears in every tray, at 0.05% on the beef and salmon and 0.06% on the chicken. That is a flourish, not a working dose of omega-3. It is also the reason a fish-sensitive dog is not covered by the beef tray.

The additive panel is fully dosed on all three, with vitamins A, D3 and E, then zinc, iron, copper, manganese, iodine and selenium, each carrying a figure. Selenium comes as sodium selenite at 0.04mg, the form most pet foods reach for. The herbs on top, rosemary, thyme and parsley at 0.03%, are there for the character of the dish more than for the dog.

Beef at 45% leads, and chicken at 16% sits behind it. This is the only tray to put two land animals together. It is the richest of the three at 8.0% fat as fed and, at 126 kcal per 100g, the one that needs the smallest portion.

£3.77 a kilo, in a single 395 g tray size.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £2.51 and £2.62 a day depending on the tray, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at roughly 667 to 694 grams, or a little under two trays.