Vet's Kitchen Everyday Health Adult Wet review

This tray settles into our Excellent band. The middle of the wet shelf sits there too, so the placement is solid without being a headline. Protein and processing and nutritional balance both read Excellent, as does value, with transparency Outstanding. What holds it steady is the 60% chicken and a label that prints an amount beside almost every entry, down to the spinach and the brewer's yeast. The rice is what stops it climbing further, since it pushes the estimated carbohydrate above where wet food usually lands. Neither of those is a warning; between them they describe a sensible everyday tray that has been written honestly.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken (60%), Wholegrain Rice (5%) (equivalent to 20% cooked rice), Dried Peas (2%) (equivalent to 9% peas), Dried Carrots (2%) (equivalent to 9% carrots), Spinach (0.15%), Seaweed (0.15%), Rapeseed Oil (0.05%), Rosemary, Parsley, Chicory Root (0.03%), Brewer's Yeast (0.03%), Glucosamine (0.0035%), Chondroitin (0.0020%) Minerals.

Chicken at 60% heads the list, with no second animal anywhere in the recipe. Nothing sits behind it: no unnamed fat, no meat derivatives, not a drop of fish oil. That is a rarer thing than it sounds, and it is what lets this tray serve a dog held to one meat. Protein converts to 40.0% of dry matter, a healthy figure for a wet food.

Wholegrain rice at 5% is the starch, printed with its cooked equivalent of 20% so you can see what it turns into once it takes up water. Dried peas and dried carrots follow at 2% each. Rice is the gentle end of the grain family and most digestions handle it easily, but it is the reason the carbohydrate estimate reads 28.0% of dry matter against a typical 15.8% for wet food. That estimate is taken by difference, so it carries everything the analysis does not separately name.

Vet's Kitchen puts its detail at the end of the list: spinach and seaweed at 0.15% each, rapeseed oil at 0.05%, chicory root and brewer's yeast at 0.03%. Chicory root is a prebiotic and the gut's friendly bacteria feed on it, while few natural ingredients carry more B vitamins than brewer's yeast. Both are printed with a figure, not waved at. Rosemary and parsley finish the recipe.

The added panel is properly dosed, with vitamin A at 2250 IU, vitamin D3 at 328 IU and vitamin E at 26mg per kilo, alongside zinc, iron, copper, iodine and selenium. Fat at 20.0% of dry matter is on the lean side for wet food, which suits a steady adult dog and leaves you room to add a little oil if your dog needs the condition.

At 104 kcal per 100g this is a middling tray for energy, a touch above the 97 typical of adult wet food. Calories per gram are low in any wet food, and a day's portion looks large next to a dry bowl for that reason. Plenty of owners serve a tray like this alongside a dry food, not on its own.

£6.20 a kilo. The trays are 395g, sold singly or in tens.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at around £5.01 a day, or roughly 808 grams, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own guide for a dog of 11 to 25kg runs from 395 to 790 grams a day.