What brands of canned food do you feed?

Nightmare ate mostly Before Grain Quail & Chicken and Merrick Surf & Turf.  He also got Wellness chicken, beef & chicken, or turkey occasionally.  He is very picky and those are the only canned foods that he and I could both agree on

I try to give our cats as much variety as possible.  These are the brands/flavors that both cats will eat and I'm comfortable feeding:

 

Nature's Variety Instinct (chicken, duck)

Nature's Variety Prairie (lamb & liver, duck & chicken, turkey & chicken)

EVO Cat & Kitten

Nature's Logic (chicken, rabbit, and duck & salmon)

Tiki Cat (chicken varieties, and the ahi tuna flavor was great for mixing in with other brands while I was transitioning both cats over to wet)

 

I feed Phaedra Wellness kitten formula but will be buying some cans of Nature's Variety Instinct :)

I feed Soulistic, which is petco's house brand. It's affordable, comes in every flavor under the sun, and has good ingredients. My cats love every flavor, and it comes in gravy with pieces of meat or pieces of meat in gelee if you end up finding out your cat prefers one of those types over the pate type.

Cats are funny, and your cat might not like what everyone else's cats like. I recommend getting a small can of everything (or at least everything with ingredients and pricing you're comfortable with) and keep a list of which ones he likes best so you can buy those again.

Well, my Phoebe has a sensitive stomach, she often cannot handle the gravies added to wet foods.  So I will feed mine canned tuna (on occassion- before anyone jumps down my back... They need the taurine in it.  And it's not everyday, so they aren't getting a mercury overload.)  I also feed them canned natual chicken with no preservatives added.  I mix those with the dry Blue Buffalo Wilderness or Pro Plan Selects.  That is every other day.  On the other days of the week,  I feed them medium cooked ground turkey (again, the natural stuff) or cooked chicken breast or livers and cut it up for them.  I tried them on the raw diet and they all turn their noses up at it.  It has to be cooked for them to eat it.  Go figure. 

I have a sensitive tummy in my crew but we use Blue spa select and they love it. We've fed Wilderness canned before and it's popular, but it's a bit outside my price range so they get the Wilderness dry in addition.

Trader Joe's canned cat food is really good and my cats like them, if you have a TraderJoe's near you.. its about 50 cents a can. I also feed them Soulistic as someone mentioned above

Pretty much, any food that does NOT contain by products or grains is best, IMO. The first ingredient should be Chicken or Turkey.. something whole.

Just a little tip...once you find some brands you like, we have found we can get better prices ordering online.  We can also get bigger cans that way, leading to even bigger savings.  We have ordered from petfooddirect.com, but we always wait for a 15 or 20% off offer or free shipping.  I get out the calculator and even with shipping added in, we are paying less per serving than at the store.  (There is one brand I can get cheaper locally, so I always do the math and check.)  I've learned my cats aren't picky, so I've even gotten brave and ordered a couple of brands that I couldn't find locally to try first.  We've liked Wellness, ByNature, Natural Balance, Before Grain and we just received some EVO but haven't tried it yet.

It's a good idea to rotate brands as a rule.  So you don't have to choose between two high quality brands - you can and should feed both! 

 

People can suggest brands for you and I think that generally there are some quality brands that are dependable for almost everyone.  But - it really does take getting into the label, though, to decide if you want to feed a certain brand or flavor of a brand.  And that will depend entirely on your own thoughts, research, kitties' temperaments, etc. 

 

As an example here are some of my criteria:

• I avoid any & all soy, corn, wheat, and brewer's rice - will absolutely not buy a food with that in it, period.  I will buy some foods that have rice (brown not brewer's) or oatmeal, though, if the other ingredients look good. 
• I don't buy canned food that has menadione sodium bisulfite complex as the vitamin K source.
• I don't buy flavors where fish is one of the first ingredients (and prefer not to see fish as an ingredient at all but will buy an otherwise quality food if fish is lower on the ingredient list).
• I don't buy foods with animal digest.
• Carbs should be as close to 0 as possible but not greater than 10% - that one is hard to tell by looking at the can so if there's a brand I'm not sure about I'll look online for the carb content (like this chart for example) and buy it next time if it passes muster.  But the rest of this list I can make my decision in the store about whether I'll buy.

 

That's about it.  Other people have other criteria... no by-products, no fish at all, gravy-style food only, etc. But usually these are decisions that can be made just by reading the label.

I don't think fish is the end of the world and some cats will only eat fishy foods, so it's better to feed a quality fishy food that he'll eat than a non-fishy one he won't.  But I don't have the fish addiction problem since mine are kittens, so I'm avoiding fish as a precaution against the high mercury levels, correlation with UTI in males, and the addiction factor.  Here's an article with 8 reasons not to feed fish (if you can help it).

Wow - 13.2oz per day sounds like a LOT of food!  At ten months old mine are 12 pounds and growing, and they eat a 5.5oz can per day.  How old is your kitten?  You can pretty much free feed kittens, but I'm not sure he'd eat 13 ounces over the course of a day.  I'd go by body condition instead of weight - look for a tucked-in waist (viewed from the top) and palpable ribs.

The general rules is 0.5 to 1 oz of wet food per lb per day (ideal weight, so if your cat is 14 lbs but should weigh 10 lbs, feed between 5 and 10 ozs of wet food per day)

I've noticed that my one year old cats don't need as much as the can serving sizes suggest.  They get the 3 oz (per meal, twice a day) recommended for 6-8 pound cats, even though they all weigh more than that 9.5, 11.5, and 13.5 lbs.)  I only buy brands that recommend that amount (about 3 oz twice a day), but I have seen canned foods that have twice the suggested serving size, which seems like a waste to me, to buy twice as much food.  Eating the amount recommended for 6-8 lb cats seems fine.  They never seem overly hungry, maintain a healthy weight (I weigh them each month) and eat the food in 30-60 minutes time (not scarfing it down like they are starving.)  I think with high protein quality food, you may not need as much to satisfy them.

You're going to have to work out what is right for you in terms of what size can to buy. I was feeding my cats the 3 oz size so I wasn't left having to throw any away, but those little guys were so expensive it was more frugal for me to throw away food every once in a while than to go through two of those things each day.

 

If you have 13.5oz, I highly recommend finding some can toppers at a pet store if you don't have them (something like http://www.petco.com/product/13553/Petco-2-in-1-Pet-Food-Can-Covers.aspx). They work much better than covering the can with aluminum foil and they keep wet food good for days since they're airtight.

BG - only poultry flavors
Wellness - only poultry flavors
Natural Balance - poultry, but occasionally venison
Taste of the Wild - chunks in gravy
Solid Gold tuna on Saturday night only

I rotate brands, and flavors daily. My 7 (one outside feral) all willingly eat these brands and flavors.


My 6 inside cats get one meal a day of canned food. Some eat 1 oz. of this, but some eat more, up to 3-4 oz. They get as much as they want (except Claude).The rest of their diet is Wellness Healthy Weight kibble. They go through about 2 1/2 cups of that every 24 hours. My fatter boy, Claude's, canned meal is 1 oz. of Natural Balance Reduced Calorie. He is not so fat anymore, and he gets the tuna like everyone else on party night-Saturday. I weigh my cats at least once a month on a digital baby scale. Their weights are amazingly stable. They are all perfectly healthy, very active, and happy.

Robin

I would not store food in a can in the refrigerator.  I wouldn't eat food stored that way (I'm pretty sure it would taste like the can.)  I love using small glass bowls with plastic lids for the leftovers.  Glass bowls can go in the microwave.  I reheat the leftovers at 50% power for the appropriate amount of time and stir the food around before serving so there aren't cold or hot spots.  Mine all eat the leftovers just fine...one prefers them, maybe because reheating brings out the aroma of the food?  I'm glad mine like the leftovers because I couln't buy the big cans and save more $$ if they didn't.  Maybe yours will be okay with leftovers too. 

Plastic would probably be fine for storage.  I'm a little iffy on reheating things in plastic containers.  I'm afraid of chemicals leeching out from the plastic into the food.  I prefer to use glass dishes in the microwave.  I have a whole assortment of small glass bowls because I love using them for fruit, ice cream, etc...  If I run out of the ones that have lids (anchor hocking brand, I think) I just put saran wrap over one.  I remove any lids or plastic wrap before reheating the food.