Symply Little Fresh: Chicken & Beef review

All seven recipes land in our Excellent band and they land there together, so choosing between them is a matter of dinner rather than of quality. The middle of the wet category sits in that same band, and this range holds its own there on the strength of a high named-meat share and a very short list of everything else. Protein and processing reads Excellent on every recipe, nutritional balance and transparency both come back Outstanding, and value holds the Excellent band with them. That is the picture you would expect from a food doing nothing eccentric: 65% meat, a fruit or a vegetable, an oil, a prebiotic and a joint supplement, with no filler to argue about.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (49%), Beef (16%), Blueberries (4%), Fresh Carrots (4%), Salmon Oil, Minerals (Glucosamine Sulphate 100mg/kg), Prebiotic (Inulin 0.4%).

Every recipe puts 65% named meat at the top, whether that is one animal or a pair. Where there are two, the split is printed: chicken at 49% with beef at 16%, chicken at 49% with cod at 16%, and chicken at 51% with lamb at 14%. Consistency like that across seven labels is unusual, and it is what makes the range so easy to rotate.

There is no cereal anywhere. Such starch as there is comes from potato, sweet potato or parsnip in small printed amounts. Carbohydrate converts to between 4.8% and 13.8% of dry matter, comfortably under the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. Protein runs the other way, converting to between 41.2% and 52.4%. Those are genuinely meat-led numbers.

The fruit and vegetables give the range its personality. Fresh apple turns up in two packs, the beef and the chicken and lamb. Cranberries are in four of the recipes, blueberries sit alongside the chicken and beef, and carrots or parsnips are scattered through the rest. All of it sits at 4% or below, so it adds flavour and a little fibre and no more.

Glucosamine sulphate is declared inside the minerals at 100mg/kg on every label. That is a real printed dose and a sensible piece of everyday joint support for a small dog. If your vet already has your dog on a joint plan, keep that going and treat this as the dinner it sits on top of.

Inulin at 0.4% is the prebiotic and salmon oil supplies the omega-3, listed without a percentage beside it. The added panel is short and fully dosed, with vitamin D3, vitamin E, biotin, zinc, manganese, copper and iodine each carrying a figure. Vitamin A does not appear on that panel, which is worth a note only if you like to see the whole set printed.

Chicken at 49% with beef at 16%, blueberries and fresh carrots behind them. Blueberries appear in this pack alone. Fibre is the highest of the seven here, at 5.0% of dry matter.

£14.90 a kilo, in 100g packs.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would work out at between £9.88 and £13.72 a day depending on the recipe, or roughly 663 to 921 grams. The sum behind it is about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). This is a small-dog range, though, so most households buying it are feeding a good deal less than that. Our estimate for a 5 kg dog runs from 261.3 grams a day on the turkey up to 443.6 grams on the lamb.