What Makes Some Cat Foods Irresistible To Our Finicky Felines?

Is your cat a picky eater? If you live with cats, then you know getting them to eat can be a common problem. Cats have a more acute sense of smell than humans, and the aroma of their food plays a big role in whether they’ll eat it. Studies show that feline palates are also more sensitive to umami (savory) flavors than humans, and they can’t taste sweetness. But is there a way to create a nutritious cat food that actually appeals to your cat?

Well, yes. A team of researchers with the College of Food Science at Northeast Agricultural University and the School of Perfume and Aroma Technology at the Shanghai Institute of Technology are currently investigating which cat food flavor sprays are most favored by cats. To do this, they teamed up with a panel of 10 hungry feline taste-testers to evaluate a series of food sprays containing different volatile flavor compounds.

The scientists prepared their food sprays by homogenizing and heat-treating chicken livers. They then broke down the proteins in the liver paste using enzymes to produce four different food attractants. The scientists identified more than 50 different flavor compounds from the sprays, ranging from tropical and floral to sweaty and rubbery.

The panel of cats taste-tested commercially available cat kibble that the researchers coated with chicken fat and then sprayed with one of the four chicken liver attractants they had formulated. This was presented to the finicky felines alongside a control food treated with a different food attractant that is commercially available. The researchers then observed which food the cats chose to eat first and how much they ate throughout the day.

The researchers found that the cats preferred food with flavor sprays that contained more free amino acids, which gave their kibble more savory and fatty flavors.

“The favored foods contained more mushroom and fatty flavors,” the researchers noted in their study. In contrast, foods with more acidic and sweet-tasting compounds were less popular among the feline taste-testers.

Although meat-flavored food attractant sprays can help improve the scent and tastiness of dry kibble for cats, the exact correlation between volatile flavor compounds and palatability is not well understood. This work could help inform future cat food formulations and increase your chances of choosing a kibble your finicky feline might enjoy.

But seriously; who cares what cats think about their food? By understanding which flavors cats prefer to eat could lead to development of tastier foods and reduce food waste, thereby ensuring that cats get proper nutrition — and this can translate to a longer, healthier life with fewer visits to the veterinarian.

So designing palatable cat foods is a complicated balancing act: formulating a food that cats will actually eat is, of course, crucial, but its nutritional balance should also be equally important. Hopefully, future research will focus on combining cats’ preferred flavors with optimal nutrient profiles to create cat foods that are both delicious and nutritionally complete.