New to cats. Need affordable but quality wet food.

Hello. I hope it is ok for me to post here.
I have never had cats before, but ended up with 2 young kitties recently. My girl Luka is about a year old and the boy Gunter is 15 weeks.
I read that they need good quality wet food. I have been buying Max Cat, but I don't know if that is a good brand?
Neither of them will eat pate style food. They aren't touching the Felidae that I bought. I don't know what to do now since I spent the pet food budget on the Felidae. Will they eat it if I keep offering? They also have Canyon Creek Ranch dry food, but are also not eating that. What should I buy next time? I get cat food every two weeks and would like to stick to a $40 budget for both cats, if possible.

Welcome to The Cat Site.

Both Max and Felidae are decent brands of wet food.  Max contains potato starch and wheat gluten, carbs which cats don't need.  Felidae contains sweet potato (a carbohydrate) and carragean (an additive, which some cats react badly to).  But not all bad. 

When introducing a new wet food, new consistencies, you can try mixing the new food with the old food to transition them to the new food.  You could try adding some water to the pate style food to see if your cats will eat it that way.

Dry food as you probably know is not as good as wet food.  Canyon Creek Ranch contains 34% protein; it also contains on a dry matter basis (the way to compare wet with dry is on a DMB) almost the same amount of carbs (36%).

I now feed raw, in part because Ritz was becoming 'addicted' to Fancy Feast Classic seafood.  While FF Classic is actually a relative okay supermarket brand (low carb, high protein), she would ONLY eat the seafood flavor.  When she was eating other brands, she loved Soulistic and Wellness. 

So one final thought:  whatever you do, rotate brands/flavors so your cats don't get addicted to one food.  AND so if the food you are feeding is recalled, you'll have another food to feed.

Finally, here is a thread that might help you decide which wet food to buy next.

have you tried looking into natures variety instinct? i buy the chicken kibble one for my 20 cats since the other flavers have tomatoe in it i dont buy there wet anymore since that has tomatoes the LID of natures variety has no grain no tomatoes no gum no carrageneen in it i haven't got the LID since i haven't been able to go to petco just to buy a few cans to try out i don't want to buy online and my cats not like it and have cans laying around

2blackKitties said:

Hello. I hope it is ok for me to post here.
I have never had cats before, but ended up with 2 young kitties recently. My girl Luka is about a year old and the boy Gunter is 15 weeks.
I read that they need good quality wet food. I have been buying Max Cat, but I don't know if that is a good brand?
Neither of them will eat pate style food. They aren't touching the Felidae that I bought. I don't know what to do now since I spent the pet food budget on the Felidae. Will they eat it if I keep offering? They also have Canyon Creek Ranch dry food, but are also not eating that. What should I buy next time? I get cat food every two weeks and would like to stick to a $40 budget for both cats, if possible.

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You should be able to take any unopened cans back to the store you bought it from (unless you ordered from the internet) and get your money back or exchange for some other branch.  My cats wouldn't touch Felidae either, and I thought it was extremely pricey.

What country do you live in?  Do you have access to big box stores like Petco, Petsmart (they have their own brands that are grain free).  Even Fancy Feast and Friskies have SOME grain free foods. 

So I would be looking for something that is high protein, middle of the line fat, LOW carb.  BTW, grain free doesn't necessariy mean low carb, but I would still be looking for grain free too!  It's just that some manufacturer's use non-grains that are still carbs, so a grain free food can be pretty high in carbs.  Here's a chart you can use to help you.  The only thing it doesn't have is prices   http://www.catinfo.org/docs/FoodChartPublic9-22-12.pdf

Thanks! I live in Connecticut. I usually go to Petsmart. Is Authority a good brand?
They do like Fancy Feast, but I thought it was low quality,so I didn't buy more. I buy different brands each time so far since I'm trying everything out.
I will try adding water to the Felidae to see if that helps.
Is it normal for me to have to stir up the food every few minutes so they eat it? My female cat stops eating after a minute and won't continue unless I stir the food around.

Mewlittle said:

have you tried looking into natures variety instinct? i buy the chicken kibble one for my 20 cats since the other flavers have tomatoe in it i dont buy there wet anymore since that has tomatoes the LID of natures variety has no grain no tomatoes no gum no carrageneen in it i haven't got the LID since i haven't been able to go to petco just to buy a few cans to try out i don't want to buy online and my cats not like it and have cans laying around

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I don't know what LID is?

Limited ingredient

Authority is a decent brand.  So is Simply Nourish, another of Petsmarts brands.  I think Authority has a pate, and Simply Nourish probably doesn't, among other differences. 

Some cats are just strange in their eating habits.  One of mine likes me to push all is food towards the middle of the bowl halfway thru his meal .  Another likes her food really, REALLY soupy, so I add about a tablespoon of water to her food before I even give it to her, and she only gets about an ounce each serving.  I have to be careful setting her bowl down to make sure I don't slosh it over the edge

I'd second the recommendation for Dr. Pierson's chart of foods (the catinfo site listed above).  That's how I found all of my canned foods, and I had such a huge variety that my cat got to try out a lot and I discovered she cannot tolerate red meats very well (she wouldn't eat the beef or venison flavors at first, and later threw them up).

Oh, and try out Nutro Natural Choice:  Petsmart usually has tons of the small size of these, which might be great for trying out new foods, and they have several that aren't pates.  My cat doesn't like pates either.  The Natural Choice line is quite good: none of the really awful things are added.  They aren't on Dr. Pierson's list (she does have Nutro Natural Choice listed, but it's an old formulation, which you can tell when you look at the names of the cat foods on her list and compare them to what you see in the store).  My cat loved the sliced turkey and minced chicken.

And speaking of strange eating habits:  my cat eats FROZEN raw nuggets, before they've been defrosted.  I was trying to find a way for her to eat later in the day, after I'd left, so I wouldn't have to give her dry food, but all she did was eat them frozen.
 

If your cat likes shredded/chunk varieties you could try the Weruva Cats in the Kitchen line.  While it's not the cheapest, my cat loves it, so I rotate it in quite a bit.  If you buy online and use codes it can be affordable.  I got my first order off Wag.com with their new customer discount code and that brought it down to under a dollar per can.  There's also DoggieFood.com that offers a discount and brings it to under $1/can.

For cheaper yet okay foods I feed Trader Joe's Turkey flavor (lower carb than the other non-fish flavor, but it's pate so I'm not sure if this would work for you) and Nutro Max Cat.  Max Cat doesn't have the best ingredients, but it's also not the worst.  I also rotate in some Tiki Cat fish flavors and Weruva BFF fish flavors infrequently.  I know some people also rotate in the Friskies classic pates to keep costs down.  

I hope you find a good solution!

I will look into those brands. Thanks!
I don't know how to read the back of the cans to make sure they are getting the right amount of nutrients, though. All I know to do is make sure there aren't any grains, minimal veggies, and that it has taurine. 

In so far as nutrients, as long as it has the "AAFCO" stamp of approval, the cat food has all the nutrients a cat needs.  Sometimes AAFCO is behind the times (taurine, for example).

Ingredients are listed in order of great to small; if the first ingredient is "chicken" and the second is "rice" then you should avoid the food!  (Similar to human nutritional labeling in that regard).

I'm glad you're trying different foods.  That way your cat won't get bored, and will be exposed to a fuller complement of proteins.  (Turkey has different nutrients in it that, say, rabbit.)

Trader Joe's wet cat food is remarkably good for its low price (69 cents a 5.5 oz can). I've heard great things about it, though this food is only available at Trader Joe's in three varieties.

My nearest TJ's is over an hour away. :/

I mean, I don't know what the percentages on the back of the can mean. What amounts should I be looking for?

The Weruva, although it's good food, is low calorie, so you end up about 1.5x to twice the volume as you would other food, so dollarwise it might be too expensive.

Hound and Gatos, if you can get it, provides a lot of bang for the buck. About $1.39/can for 98% protein.

There have been a couple other threads lately about homecooked food, but if you're new to kitties it might be too much to take on at once. Homecooked is cheap, but you can't just throw together anything. There's a lot of supplementation needed and you have to know stuff like calcium to phosphorus ratios.

In order to understand the percentages on the can you have to learn how to calculate nutrient values on a dry matter basis. Here is a good summary of the vast subject of feline nutrition:

http://fnae.org/food.html

Sorry, forgot Hound and Gatos is pate!

Ok, now I have found some raw foods that I originally thought were too expensive, but now see they may not be. My kitten is probably 2-4 lbs and my 1 year old cat is about 6 lbs. I'm horrible at math, so I'm not sure how long a 3 lb bag of raw food would last? I was thinking Primal or Nature's Variety?

Primal has a raw food calculator.  You can figure out how many ounces of raw food your cats will need.

2blackKitties said:

Thanks! I live in Connecticut. I usually go to Petsmart. Is Authority a good brand?
They do like Fancy Feast, but I thought it was low quality,so I didn't buy more. I buy different brands each time so far since I'm trying everything out.
I will try adding water to the Felidae to see if that helps.
Is it normal for me to have to stir up the food every few minutes so they eat it? My female cat stops eating after a minute and won't continue unless I stir the food around.

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I highly recommend Simply Nourish 3oz cans, especially chicken, if you go to Petsmart. It is excellent quality grain-free food, and they frequently have it on sale for $1 /can.

I have two cats - one is a very picky eater; the other will eat almost anything (sometimes with consequences ).  I try to feed canned as much as possible, or refrigerated Freshpet Vital (excellent also - chicken/whitefish roasted). The cat that eats everything tried many types of canned food during the last year, and most of them she gets tired of quickly - including Natures Variety, Wellness and Avoderm. Avoderm seems to have a QC problem - some of their lots are much better than others, by the way, so dont buy it in bulk. Nature's variety is supposed to be pretty good, and she liked it at the beginning (duck especially), but now she doesnt eat it at all. Another fairly good done is INNOVA canned.  But both of our cats really seem to enjoy Simply Nourish (flaked chicken in small cans), and dont seem to get tired of it, after 6 months of getting it every morning. They also have very good kibble food called "SOURCE", 40% protein content, grain free.  My picky cat eats it like its the best thing ever:

http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=17702056&lmdn=Brand&f=PAD/psNotAvailInUS/No

Hi. I have some more questions. It's getting expensive to feed my kitties.
This last payday I spent over $100 just for their food and cat litter for two weeks. I can't keep doing that. That time I bought Wellness canned food, Natural Balance dry food, Petite Cuisine wet food, Halo wet food,  Wiskas  Purrfect portions wet food, and Friskies wet food.
I really feel bad for buying the Wiskas and Friskies because I know they aren't the same quality as the Wellness, but they were only $.59 a can compared to the $1.89-$2 for the better brands. So, my question is, how bad is it to feed them the lower quality brand for a while until we can afford the Wellness and such again? I really do not want to feed my cats grains and by products,  but I can't seem to do that on my preferred budget per two weeks. I was hoping only to spend about $40 on food. That's not easy when they are eating all wet food, which is what I feel is best for them. 

My cats weigh about 10 lbs each, so I think that means they need two 5.5 oz cans of wet food per day, correct? 
That's 4 cans of food per day at often $2 per can.