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Whats the best cat food?

This is a question that is continually searched for online, and we get asked it all the time, so where do we start?

There are so many opinions on what the best cat food is, that it is really difficult to find clear cut answers – from those that say it must be raw, to those that say grains are good – and every other opinion in between, it becomes a nightmare to find the right answers.

To make matters even worse, a lot of the information you will find is simply based on opinion and beliefs, alongside a great big dollop of smoke and mirrors from the multi-billion dollar dog food corporations who own most of the well-known cat food brands.

Mars, Nestle and Colgate are not names immediately associated with UK pet foods, but these goliaths own most of the well-known pet food brands in the UK and USA, but that certainly doesn’t make their food the best – they’re just the best at marketing their products. And as they are so dominant in the supermarkets and multiple chain stores, you may well believe that they are the ONLY foods available – but this is far from the case.

Did you know?

Mars own: Pedigree, Cesar, Chappi, Frolic, Kitekat, Pal, Nutro, Greenies, James Wellbeloved, Royal Canin, Sheba, Whiskas.

Nestle own: Tails.com, Bakers, Beneful, Beta, Bonio, Felix, Friskies, Just Right, ProPlan, Purina One, Purina Veterinary Diets, Winalot.

Colgate-Palmolive own: Hills Science Plan, Hills Prescription Diets.

Why should you listen to us?

We have gathered knowledge through years of research and pet ownership, as to what the dietary needs of a domestic cat are – but this is absolutely not enough on its own. You also need to fully understand what is actually in the food as well. And we have spent years analysing pet food labelling and ingredients, and we know ALL the tricks that the manufacturers use – and boy do they use them!!

Combining these two sets of knowledge together, in our opinion, gives us the right attributes to give you our recommendations. You will always get clear accurate and informative advice from us, based on the specific dietary needs of your cat. We have helped hundreds of pet owners find the right food for their furry family.

We are not led by the big brands, as we are only prepared to sell pet food diets that are clearly labelled with simple healthy ingredients priced across all budgets. We totally believe that pets are essential members of the family, and we are driven to help all of our customers make informed choices so that they can feed the best possible diets to their pets, ensuring they always get the best nutrition and care.

What is our opinion?

As anyone who lives with a cat already knows, they won’t eat just anything. The best cat food has to meet all manner of requirements for these quality-conscious creatures: great flavour, decent variety, delicious texture, high meat content. In fact, high meat content is not just desirable to cats, but physically essential. Unlike humans, cats cannot be vegetarian. Deprive them of meat or fish and they’ll get ill very quickly.

Cat’s belong to the family of obligate carnivores, this type of carnivore is one that depends entirely on meat because their diet requires nutrients that are only found in animal flesh. Unlike dogs, cats have little to no interest in fruit and vegetables as they don’t really give them any nutritional value. This is because dogs are not considered obligate carnivores but they are not true omnivores either. This means that while dogs do need meat to survive, they can also benefit from plants in their diet as well. Cats and other obligate carnivores (like dolphins, seals, eagles and walruses) are not able to digest plants properly and can not get enough nutrients from them.

All felines are obligate carnivores, whether it’s a domesticated house cat or a wild mountain lion. Throughout their entire evolutionary history, cats have been obligate carnivores, making their need for meat a biological necessity and an ancestral trait.

If you take a moment to think about the the cats ancestors (wild cats), they would be roaming the land hunting or even catching small animals like rabbits, birds etc. A dead rabbit carcass would go down an absolute treat… the fur, bones, organs, and meat – no problem. This would easily and quickly be digested, including the fur that would act as a natural de-wormer.

Cats have evolved by eating raw prey immediately after it has been hunted. A cat’s digestive tract is short compared to other types of eaters, and it is designed to digest protein and fat quickly.

The necessity of eating meat, which may involve hunting live prey, makes sharp teeth and claws a common adaptation of obligate carnivores. Cats have four front canine teeth that help them grip and bite into flesh, and their strong jaw is extremely helpful to facilitate ripping the meat from prey’s bone and to aid in shredding the meal.

This type of scavenging and hunting gave the wild cat a balanced diet, with few ingredients, and a meat protein and a low carbohydrate source perfectly matching their digestive needs. And a domestic cat is basically no different, they are highly adapted to eat meat, and like all carnivores find it difficult to digest large quantities of unnatural grains.

The key here is the word LARGE… for years, and still today, many pet food diets contain large amounts of unnatural difficult to digest ingredients like cereals, and for years these cheap ingredients/fillers were (and still are) commonly used in the majority of cat & dog foods, and very often you will find them in some of the most well-known brand leading foods.

Why is diet so important?

Your cat’s diet performs a huge role in supporting their immune system, as about 80% of the cat & dogs immunity comes from the gut, and this is so important. This immunity is what helps your cat fight the toxins they are exposed to on a daily basis, and a poor diet or compromised digestive system, will have huge negative implications to their healthy gut microbes. Poor diets with unnatural ingredients will reduce the number of enzymes in the gut, which affects the immune system – and the immune system is ultimately what keeps the cat healthy.

Creating and maintaining a strong immune system is an important part of good health, as the digestive system does much more than just digest food. The gut is an interactive system that connects to all parts of the body, and if this system is not working correctly through poor diet, it can lead to long term autoimmune disorders such as intolerances, allergies, arthritis, irritable bowels, organ diseases and cancers.

A cats digestive system is designed to digest food quickly, and the intestinal tract will destroy toxins, bacteria, and parasites when working efficiently. This process requires the immune system to work hard when digesting food, so if your cat is constantly trying to digest large amounts of unnatural highly processed high starch non diverse ingredients such as grains and cereals, it doesn’t have the strength to perform efficiently and toxins start to build up and weaken the immune system.

What are the common mistakes?

Choosing the right healthy food for your cat is incredibly difficult, and the millions of pounds spent on marketing by the likes of the Mars, Nestle & Colgate companies, drowns you in an sea of wonderfully packaged glossy products – so we have listed some of the common mistakes that are normally made.

1. Doing an online search…

An online search for “what is the best cat food” really doesn’t give you any answers you can trust, with most first page results being paid for by the manufacturers to appear at the top of your search page. All the top results will show “Ad” by the result, and these should be ignored as the supplier of these foods has paid for their product to come up top of your search – it is called “pay per click” and leading brands will pay handsomely to appear on this first page. The more they pay, the more times they appear in the top listing of page one, making them appear to be the best as their names always come up in front of you.

Next up will be some review sites, and these must be looked at very carefully as to who is actually behind them, as there can be many fake recommendations or misleading star ratings. Fake reviews are incredibly common, and star ratings with no information are also very misleading and should be treated with some scepticism. It is also best to ignore anything that shows reviews or damming reports from the USA, as we have much stricter regulations in the production of animal foods than they do, and very often the issues reported do not affect the UK marketplace.

2. Use a social media post…

Ask the question “Can anybody recommend a really good cat food” on social media, and you will get dozens of responses all recommending a range of completely different foods and brands. Very often there is no background to the recommendation, and what helped one cat owner, can be detrimental to the next. Shortly after asking the question, your social media feed fills full of cat food brands adverts, again being paid for by the manufacturer to get their name in front of you.

3. It must be good; I see it advertised on TV…

Only the huge corporations can afford the costs of these massive advertising campaigns. Companies like Mars Petcare and Nestle Purina are multi-billion dollar turnover businesses, and they own numerous dog food & cat food brands, for instance Mars owns Pedigree and Royal Canin, but it doesn’t mean they offer the best pet food.

4. They sell it in veterinary practices: it must be good…

Very often you will see brands such as Royal Canin, Purina and Hills sold at the vets, but just because these brands have positioned themselves directly in a veterinary practice with incentives, it doesn’t mean they are the best. Royal Canin is notorious for having complicated ingredient lists, and they very rarely list the percentages in the diet. Here is a typical Royal Canin ingredients list..

Rice, maize, dehydrated poultry protein, maize gluten, animal fats, hydrolysed animal proteins, beet pulp, vegetable protein isolate, fish oil, minerals, psyllium husks and seeds, soya oil etc

No percentages, no named animal source, and the top two ingredients being rice and maize. You have no idea what the meat protein source is because poultry means either (or all) Duck, Chicken or Turkey and you will never know. Animal fats or hydrolysed animal proteins can be from any animal species, and again you don’t know what you’re feeding. Do the vets actually know what they are selling ingredients wise??

5. The breeder gave it me to get started…

Very similar to the “vets selling pet food” scenario – the big brands offer substantial discounts and incentives for registered breeders to use their products, which in turn means that when you get your new kitten or puppy, the breeder supplies you with the discounted (or sometimes free) manufacturers food. Unfortunately, this whole process is driven by marketing money, again from the large corporations – a very clever tactic to get you on their brands – but it still doesn’t mean it’s the best!

6. The supermarket sells its own brand, and it’s cheap…

You will see in the supermarkets and discount chain stores (the likes of Aldi and B&M), offering a cheap dry biscuit cat food, and they are really cheap – but how do they do it? Well, we’re back to understanding the labelling of the ingredients, a good example of a supermarket brand glossy bag will state on the front that its 100% complete and balanced with chicken & vegetables, what more could your cat want?

But actually, based on the ingredients label it will only have 4% chicken, and 1.25% vegetables in the form of dried peas – shocking! The other 94.75% of the diet consists of unknown cereals (the highest ingredient in the diet) with meat and animal derivatives and oils & fats from an unknown animal species. Basically, a big bag of unknown stuff, containing unnatural cereals as the main ingredient, and a tiny amount of chicken and vegetables, AND THAT’S WHY ITS CHEAP!!

Confusing labelling not helping?

Manufacturers are really clever in tricking you into purchasing a poor unnatural diet by hiding exactly what is in the food – sounds a bit dramatic we know – but you will be shocked at how the description on the front of the bag, differs completely from the actual ingredients list!!

They use fantastic descriptions on the front of the bag, with phrases that really appeal to you [the human], but then using loopholes in the labelling regulations they hide the poor or unnatural ingredients in the recipe. Through no fault of your own, you’re effectively being tricked into feeding poor quality, unnatural ingredients to your cat, which over time can be really damaging to your pet’s immune system and subsequently its health..

The following is an example of a major brand of cat and dog food owned by Mars Petcare that can at best be described as “misleading” as it is promoted and advertised as…

100% complete and balanced expert nutrition for your cat to enjoy and thrive on. Our tasty adult recipe with lamb is based on high quality animal protein, carefully selected to support your dog’s 7 signs of healthy vitality.

This all sounds fine, but the diet actually only contains 4.1% lamb – yes that’s right – even though the front of the glossy bag states it’s lamb, enforced by an image of a lamb, it only contains this tiny amount. The main meat source of the diet is actually Chicken and Turkey (30%), but there is no mention of this on the front of the bag. Having this meat source doesn’t make the diet bad, but why completely mislead the consumer by indicating that the diet is Lamb when it isn’t??

What does make the diet poor, is that it contains approximately 60% of cheap high starch, highly processed, non-diverse ingredients of Maize, Barley and Sorghum (similar to maize) for which long term feeding will very likely weaken the immune system leading to intolerances, allergies, and illness down the line.

How do you choose a healthy cat food?

Every cat is different, and they can have specific needs, but for a really good basic rule of thumb we always recommend you start off with the following…

• Feed a high meat content with a named species.
• NO or LOW grain contents.
• NO antioxidants, preservatives, or minerals.
• Balanced healthy simple ingredients (meat, fruit, veg)
• Main ingredients must show their percentages.

This sounds simple, but as we have said, the massive corporations make life very difficult by hiding the poor quality ingredients in their labelling, and this is where we can help you find the best healthy diet for your family pet. We are not brand led with the foods we stock, and we only sell the healthiest diets across all budgets, with clearly labelled foods that we have fully analysed and can whole heartedly endorse, which can then be tailored to your exact needs.

What's on the menu?

At Homefeeds we currently stock 3 main ways of feeding cats.
This being Raw Food, Wet Food and Dry Kibble.

Each one of these ways of feeding has it’s good and bad points, but we strongly stand behind the high quality range that we stock, offering your cat the best diet that also works with your budget.

Raw Cat Food

Wet Cat Food

Dry Cat Food