Tails.com Optimum Care: Rustic Beef with Pumpkin & Broccoli review

Every recipe comes out in our Excellent band and they are separated by very little, so there is no wrong choice inside the range. Wet does well on our scoring, and that same band holds the middle of the shelf. The honest reading is that this range is a solid, well-declared example of the format, not an outlier above it. Nutritional balance and transparency read Outstanding on all five, with protein and processing and value both Excellent throughout. What lifts it is straightforward: a named meat at 65%, every other ingredient declared with a percentage, and an analysis that stands up once the water is taken out.

Ingredients, as declared: 65% beef*, 4% pumpkin*, 4% broccoli*, minerals, 0.2% salmon oil*, 0.12% chicory root powder* (providing 0.08% inulin), 0.1% dried parsley*, 0.05% green-lipped mussel powder, 0.02% Yucca schidigera powder*. *Natural ingredient

One construction runs through all five trays. A named meat at 65%, two named plants at 4% each, then minerals. After that come salmon oil at 0.2%, chicory root powder at 0.12%, a dried herb at 0.1%, green-lipped mussel powder at 0.05% and Yucca schidigera powder at 0.02%. Every single entry carries a percentage. In wet food that is rare, and worth saying out loud.

At 65%, the named meat is doing the work you would want it to. Protein converts to between 45.8% and 60.0% of dry matter depending on the tray, and estimated carbohydrate stays between 2.4% and 7.5%, well under the 15.8% that is typical of adult wet food. These are meat dinners with a garnish of plants, not plant dinners with meat in them.

The plant pairings change with the meat, and they are chosen with some care. Parsnip and courgette go with lamb, butternut squash and kale with chicken, pumpkin and broccoli with beef, swede and apple with turkey, sweet potato and cranberry with duck. At 4% each they season and colour the recipe rather than bulk it out, and cranberry in particular brings vitamin C and antioxidants along with it.

Chicory root powder at 0.12% is declared as providing 0.08% inulin. That inulin is a prebiotic fibre, and its job is to feed the gut bacteria a dog is already carrying. Green-lipped mussel powder at 0.05% is the range's nod to joint comfort, valued for its unusual omega-3 profile, and Yucca schidigera at 0.02% is a long-standing wet food inclusion sitting at token level.

Salmon oil at 0.2% runs across the whole range. It is a small but real source of marine omega-3. Because of it, no tray here is a genuine one-animal recipe. That only matters if you are running a formal elimination diet.

The herbs rotate with the recipe, rosemary on the lamb, parsley on the chicken and beef, sage on the turkey and duck, each declared at 0.1%. Rosemary in particular does a job beyond flavour: it is a natural antioxidant, and antioxidants slow the fats going rancid.

The mineral panel is dosed in print and consistent across the range: copper at 2.8mg/kg, zinc at 12.0mg/kg, manganese at 1.0mg/kg, iodine at 0.3mg/kg and vitamin D3 at 140.0iu/kg. Most of the micronutrition in a recipe this meat-rich comes from the food itself, and a compact added panel is exactly what you would expect.

Beef at 65% with pumpkin and broccoli at 4% each. Protein reads highest here at 60.0% of dry matter, and at 20.0% fat it is the leanest of the five. That makes it a sensible pick for a dog carrying a little too much weight.

£6.47 a kilo across every recipe, sold as 8 x 300 g trays or 8 x 150 g trays.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £4.52 and £6.86 a day depending on the recipe. Those day rates come off a maintenance figure of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That corresponds to between 699 and 1061 grams a day, the turkey tray being the most concentrated and the lamb the least.