Cat Food Reviews

We found that the best information and reviews on cat food come from websites written and maintained by people who love cats. About.com's Fran Syufy includes excellent nutritional information, including dry and canned cat food recommendations based on protein content and other ingredients. (Note that About.com and ConsumerSearch are owned by the same parent company, but are not affiliated editorially.) Veterinarian Lisa A. Pierson is a proponent of feeding cats a raw-food diet, but her CatInfo.org site also maintains a list of high-quality canned foods as well. Although we find some significant flaws with the rating system used, AskSusanPeters.com provides grades for a wide variety of foods ranging from "supermarket" brands to premium cat food. A blog called Tipped Ear Clan weighs in with recommendations on cat foods as well, but also provides a pointed list of foods to avoid based on ingredient lists. User feedback at several retailer websites, as well as the busy Catster.com forums, also provide great insight.

Those looking for insight from more traditional experts such as Consumer Reports will be disappointed. Consumer Reports' last attempt to rate cat food took place just about a decade ago and was fraught with methodology issues that set cat fanciers howling. The biggest misstep, according to most, is that the ratings concentrated on cost and palatability instead of nutrition. To its credit, Consumer Reports responded to the criticisms by redoing and republishing its report soon after that, but has largely avoided testing cat foods since.

The quality of ingredients in cat food has become more important than ever in many owners' eyes, especially following the pet-food recalls of last year. Most of the recommendations we saw are based on ingredients and nutrition as opposed to side-by-side testing of cat food brands. In most reviews, experts and cat owners alike are interested in the same high standards for cat food as they have for their own diets: an emphasis on high-quality ingredients -- especially proteins -- along with as few preservatives and artificial ingredients as possible.

At the lower end of the cat food price spectrum are supermarket brands like Friskies, Fancy Feast and Whiskas. Pet owners posting to discussion groups rave about how their cats gobble up these products, but they are only rarely mentioned when experts are asked to recommend the best cat foods. A glance at the food labels shows that many -- but not all -- varieties of these foods are loaded with undesirable ingredients such as meat by-products, grains and glutens. This is a far cry from the type of diet reviews say cats need. Most pet-nutrition experts say the best cat foods are brands that are formulated to replicate a raw-food diet and meet higher nutritional standards.

Cats are obligate carnivores and experts say that meat should be their primary source of protein for proper health. Just as for human food, there are regulations regarding the labeling of cat food that can help consumers assess the amount of meat in the food. If a product is labeled "Beef Cat Food," for example, 95 percent of its ingredients must be beef. If it says "Chicken Dinner" or "Lamb Formula," it must contain only 25 percent of the meat. If the packaging simply states "Chicken Flavor," the food merely needs to taste like chicken to the cat; it does not need to actually have any chicken in it.  ... Continued

Our Consensus Report shows how many times products are top-ranked by reviewers included in our
All The Reviews Reviewed chart.

Experts recommend premium cat foods much more often than store brands. That's because these foods contain more meat and natural ingredients than cheaper foods, whose primary ingredients are often corn meal, glutens or by-products instead of chicken, lamb or fish. The premium foods are low in bulk, so the cat needs to eat less. The higher-quality foods also contain no dyes or artificial preservatives.