Wainwright's Puppy Trays With Superfoods review

A short list scores well with us when what is on it is good, and this is close to as short as a complete food gets. The tray reaches our Excellent band, the same territory the middle of the wet puppy field occupies, and it holds its own in that company. Nutritional balance and transparency are the standouts here, both reading Outstanding, with protein and processing Good and value Excellent.

The paperwork is what stops it going further, not the recipe. The additive panel states no nutritional additives and lists only trace elements, and the analysis never reaches calcium. On a growth food fed as the only meal, both are things an owner would reasonably want spelled out.

Ingredients, as declared: Freshly Prepared Organic Chicken (60%), Organic Pumpkin (2%), Organic Beetroot (2%), Minerals, Sunflower Oil

Freshly prepared organic chicken at 60% is the whole engine of this recipe. Fresh chicken goes in with its water still in it, so a great deal of what you see in the finished tray came from that entry. The analysis says the same thing. Protein of 10.0% as fed becomes 55.6% of dry matter once the moisture is taken out, and that is a genuinely meaty figure. Fat follows at 6.0%, or 33.3% of dry matter.

Organic pumpkin and organic beetroot at 2% each are the only plant foods present. Both are there for gentle fibre and colour rather than bulk, and the carbohydrate estimate says as much, landing at nothing measurable. Fibre is declared at 0.3%, which is 1.7% of dry matter, so there is very little roughage in this tray at all.

Sunflower oil closes the list. It is one of the more useful plant oils in a dog food, since it is light on saturated fat and carries vitamin E naturally. It is also the only added fat here. No thickener, gum or gravy appears anywhere, which is unusual in a wet food and part of why the recipe reads so cleanly.

The declaration is where an owner is left short. The panel states no nutritional additives and names zinc, manganese and iodine among the trace elements, with no added vitamins listed at all. Ash is declared at 2.2%, which is 12.2% of dry matter, but calcium is not broken out, and calcium is the figure large breed growth turns on. If a big adult frame is where your pup is going, that is a question for the maker before you commit.

One thing this label does better than most: the energy figure of 84 kcal per 100g is declared rather than estimated. It is a modest number, well under the 106 kcal typical of a wet puppy food, which simply means a bigger tray-and-a-bit for the same growth.

£8.60 a kilo, in 150g trays.

Puppy amounts refuse to sit still. They follow age and expected adult size, so no single number covers the whole of growth. Start from the tray chart and fine-tune by your pup's condition. Across the sizes it covers, the label's own guide spans 75g to 900g a day.