Symply Adult Grain Free Trays: Chicken Dinner review

The Chicken Dinner and the Duck & Turkey finish in our Outstanding band. The Duck Roast and the Poached Salmon sit a step below in Excellent, where the middle of the wet category sits too, so this range is at home in strong company. Three of the trays read Outstanding for protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency, with the Poached Salmon Outstanding on two of those and Excellent on the third. What does the work across the whole range is the meat share, because nothing here dips below 72% animal content on the label and there is no cereal to dilute it.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (72%), Butternut Squash (4%), Peas (3%), Carrots (1%), Minerals, Salmon Oil (0.5%), Alfalfa, Seaweed (0.12%), Prebiotic - Fructooligosaccharide, Yucca Extract.

Every label prints its meat share: chicken at 72%, duck at 41% with turkey at 31%, duck at 50% with chicken at 22%, and salmon on its own at 86%. A number beside every animal entry is the most useful habit a wet label can have, and this range keeps it up across all four.

No cereal turns up anywhere in these four trays. Butternut squash carries the starch on the Chicken Dinner, sweet potato on the Duck & Turkey and potato on the other two, all in small amounts. Peas and carrots sit alongside on three of the labels. Carbohydrate converts to between 7.3% and 20.4% of dry matter, against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. The Duck & Turkey is the leanest on starch by a distance.

Protein converts to between 37.5% and 44.2% of dry matter and fat to between 26.0% and 32.7%, a properly meat-led set of numbers for food fed from a tray. Each of those conversions comes off a declared moisture figure rather than an assumption.

Salmon oil at 0.5% brings the omega-3 on three of the trays and the Poached Salmon takes its own from the fish. Seaweed at 0.12% is the iodine and trace mineral note, alfalfa appears on three of the labels, and yucca extract is the finishing touch that tends to make the garden a more agreeable place.

The added panel is short and dosed. Vitamins A, D3 and E appear throughout, with zinc, iron, copper and iodine supplied as chelates on three of the labels. The Chicken Dinner prints calcium at 0.62% and phosphorus at 0.47% in their place. Its calcium converts to 2.07% of dry matter, comfortable for an adult dog and a shade more generous than most wet trays declare.

Chicken at 72% with butternut squash behind it. No other tray uses squash, and no other prints its calcium and phosphorus. It is the most energy dense of the four at an estimated 132 kcal per 100g, so portions run smallest here.

The trays are 395 g each and the price works out at £7.57 a kilo. They are sold singly or in packs of seven.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to between £4.82 and £5.90 a day depending on the tray. All of that assumes about 840 kcal a day for the dog (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That is roughly 637 to 779 grams, and the energy figures behind it are our estimate rather than declared.