Naturo Senior Dog Turkey with Rice and Vegetables 7pk

An old dog eats with their nose first. Appetite tends to fade before teeth do, and warm, wet, strongly smelling food is what gets a bowl finished when a dry one is being walked away from — which is most of the reason wet trays sell to the owners of senior dogs at all.

Naturo's senior recipe leads on turkey at 65%, with brown rice at 12.5% and vegetables at 10% from dried potato, carrots and peas. Sunflower oil at 0.75% and salmon oil at 0.3% carry the omega fats, and underneath those sits a long tail of small inclusions — tomato powder, dried kelp, cranberry, blueberry, chicory root, yeast, basil and yucca, each of them well under a percent. Glucosamine and chondroitin are added for joints. It is not grain free, and the brown rice is deliberate rather than a filler afterthought.

• Turkey 65%, brown rice 12.5%, vegetables 10%
• Protein 9.5%, fat 8.5%, crude fibre 0.5%, crude ash 3.8%, moisture 73%
• Sunflower oil 0.75% and salmon oil 0.3%
• Glucosamine and chondroitin added for joints
• Nutritional additives include vitamin E 40mg and L-carnitine 25mg per kg
• 400g trays, supplied in a pack of seven

On the analysis, because it looks wrong until you know why. Protein reads 9.5% here, against something in the twenties on a bag of dry food, and that is not a weaker recipe — it is water. Moisture is 73%, so nearly three quarters of what is in the tray is liquid, and the protein figure is measured across the whole thing. Wet and dry analyses cannot be compared side by side without correcting for that. Naturo also publish no calorie figure for this recipe, so portioning has to come off their own feeding guide rather than off the numbers above, and your vet is the right person to ask if weight is the reason you are changing food.

Who it's for: owners of an older dog who has gone off dry food, dogs who could use the joint additions, and anyone feeding a mix who wants the wet half of it to be mostly meat.