Wellness Core 95%: Beef With Broccoli review

All five trays sit in our Outstanding band, the turkey with kale included, and they are separated by very little. We score adult wet well as a category, and the middle of that shelf already reaches the Excellent band. A 95% meat tray finishing a step above it is a fair result, not a startling one. Protein and processing reads Excellent on every recipe, with nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding.

Ingredients, as declared: 95% Beef [66% (Hearts, Meat, Livers, Lungs), 29% Beef Broth], 3.5% Broccoli, 1% Minerals, 0.5% Sunflower Oil.

The 95% headline is unusually well behaved. On the beef, lamb and turkey with kale recipes it is 66% named meat and organ with 29% of that animal's own broth. On the chicken and duck and the turkey and goat recipes it is 56% plus 29% broth, with 10% of the second animal alongside. Broth declared with a percentage is a great deal more useful than water slipped in without one. Depending on the recipe, protein converts to between 40.4% and 54.3% of dry matter. That is a genuinely meat-led reading.

Organ meat is named rather than hidden. Hearts, livers, lungs and necks appear on the lists. Few foods pack in more nutrition than liver, which brings vitamin B12, vitamin A, copper and folate and digests easily. It is also why these recipes taste as strong as they do, which suits some dogs enormously and takes others a meal or two to come round to.

The vegetable is a single entry per recipe, at 3.5% or 4%, and it is chosen to match the meat. Broccoli goes with beef, pumpkin with lamb, kale with turkey, carrots with the chicken and duck, sweet potato with the turkey and goat. None of them is there in a quantity that changes the nutrition much, and none of them is a cereal.

Sunflower oil at 0.5% appears on the beef and the lamb only. As plant oils on an ingredient list go, this is one of the better ones, low in saturated fat and carrying vitamin E of its own. On a recipe with this much animal fat in it already, the oil is a finishing touch and nothing more.

One figure deserves an explanation. On the beef tray the carbohydrate estimate reaches 23.5% of dry matter, and on the turkey and goat 13.1%. Next to an ingredient list holding no starch whatsoever, that looks odd. That figure is calculated by subtracting the declared protein, fat, fibre, ash and moisture from the whole, so anything the panel rounds or leaves out lands in it. On a recipe like this it is arithmetic, not starch.

The added panel is short and dosed: vitamin D3 at 200 IU and zinc at 25 mg per kilo on every recipe, with manganese and iodine alongside and copper appearing on three of the five. In a food this meat-rich, much of the vitamin and mineral load arrives in the ingredients themselves. A short panel here reads as confidence, not as economy.

Beef at 95%, made up of 66% hearts, meat, livers and lungs with 29% beef broth, then broccoli at 3.5% and sunflower oil at 0.5%. It is the richest tray in the range at 132 kcal per 100g, so portions run smallest here, and it is the only one labelled for older dogs as well as adults. Its carbohydrate estimate of 23.5% of dry matter comes from the declared panel, not from anything on the list.

There is one size, 400g, and every recipe uses it.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition gets an allowance of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at between 634 and 918 grams depending on which tray you feed, with the dense beef at the light end and the chicken and duck at the heavy end.