Years Complete Nutrition System: Chicken Thigh Vegetable Casserole review

Our Outstanding band takes in every recipe here, and the five scores sit almost on top of each other. Fresh food is strong company to keep, and the typical fresh adult food also sits in our Outstanding band, so holding that line across a whole range is a real result rather than a given. Protein and processing, transparency and value all read Outstanding on every one of the five, and nutritional balance does too. Let the animal your dog does best with make the choice.

Ingredients, as declared: Fresh Chicken Leg (15%) [Fresh Chicken thigh 60%, Fresh Chicken drumstick 40%], Fresh Chicken Gizzards (15%), Fresh Chicken Heart (15%), Fresh Chicken Liver (15%), Fresh Sweet Potato (11%), Fresh Red Pepper (9.5%), Fresh Pre-soaked Buckwheat (7.2%), Fresh Spinach Leaf (2.8%), Cold-Pressed Rosemary-infused Sunflower Oil (2.17%), Fresh Courgette (2%), Deactivated Nutritional Yeast (1%), Fresh Apple (1%), Vitamins & Minerals (1%), Fresh Pre-soaked Quinoa (0.8%), Taurine (0.25%), Cold-Pressed Organic Hempseed Oil (0.2%), Sun Dried Oregano (0.05%), Algae Powder (0.05%), Alfalfa powder (0.05%), Nettle Powder (0.04%), Chicory Root Powder (0.04%), Kelp Powder (0.03%), Chamomile Powder (0.02%), Dandelion Powder (0.01%).

Fresh cooking changes what a meat percentage means. These trays declare between 65.9% and 70.0% moisture, so the animal entries are counted as the wet ingredients they genuinely are rather than as a dried concentrate. Add the named animal lines together on any of the five labels and the total comes to 60%, split between muscle and organ, which is the sort of consistency only a fixed formula produces.

The organ work is the part worth lingering over. The chicken tray gives gizzards, heart and liver 15% each behind its leg meat, and the turkey puts heart at 27% behind a 28% leg. Behind the beef forequarter steak come lung, heart, liver and kidney. Organs are where a carcass keeps most of its vitamin and trace mineral density. A named cut with a figure against it says far more than one meat entry ever could.

Starch comes from pre-soaked buckwheat and quinoa, with no cereal involved. Quinoa is a seed off a spinach relative, not a grass, and it carries a genuinely useful protein and fibre profile of its own. Buckwheat does a similar job with a gentler character. Sweet potato, peppers, parsnip and spinach fill in around them, and the estimated carbohydrate runs between 22.6% and 27.0% of dry matter across the recipes.

Two cold-pressed oils run through the range: a rosemary-infused sunflower oil doing most of the fat work, with organic hempseed oil behind it. Rosemary earns its keep twice over, because as well as its own flavour it is a natural antioxidant that slows oils turning stale. Deactivated nutritional yeast at 1% appears on every label for its B vitamins and savoury note. Taurine at 0.25% is added deliberately, an amino acid that matters to heart function and one that meat led recipes tend to include on purpose.

The last stretch of each list is herbs and powders at fractions of a percent: alfalfa, nettle, chicory root, kelp, chamomile and dandelion, with algae powder on several of the trays. Of that lot, chicory root does a job beyond seasoning: its inulin feeds the friendly bacteria already living in the gut. The added vitamin and mineral premix sits at 1% and its panel is printed out per kilo of food, calcium among it at 4874mg on most of the range.

Chicken leg at 15% is itself broken down into 60% thigh and 40% drumstick, with gizzards, heart and liver each matching it at 15%. Sweet potato at 11% and red pepper at 9.5% do the most work behind the bird. This is the gentlest tray of the range on energy at 140 kcal per 100g, with fat converting to 21.0% of dry matter. For a steadier dog it is the natural starting point.

£9.48 a kilo across all five recipes. Trays come in 280g, 630g, 770g, 875g, 980g and 1155g, sold singly or in fours, with 8 × 320g and 8 × 630g cases going to retail stockists.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works through roughly 475 to 600 grams a day, the exact figure following the recipe. That figure comes from about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That comes to between £4.50 and £5.69 a day, with the richer trays feeding in smaller portions than the leaner ones.