FirstMate Chicken Meal with Blueberries Formula Limited Ingredient Diet Grain-Free Dry Cat Food

2bcat said:

 
The story is funny: the parent company makes feed for fish farming  and they developed their dog food originally because the fish farmers complained that dogs were getting into and stealing this fish food!

In terms of dry food, it doesn't get too much simpler, just the meat protein, potato and supplements.  Putting blueberries as part of the name is a little suspect; they really do that to attract humans as a cat wouldn't eat blueberries of course.  I suppose there may be some minor net benefit to addition of the blueberries even if a cat wouldn't itself eat them directly.  It's no different than, say, Nature's Logic making their foods with no synthesized supplements (even though many of the ingredients needed to do that are vegetables).

I think in terms of kibble one could do much, much worse.

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2Cats4Me said:

 
The blueberries I have no problem with  .  I just wish it did not have the potato ..Other than that it would be perfect .  .. I guess I will keep looking . 

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2bcat said:

 
Eh, it's kibble.  It's going to have potato, sweet potato, peas, chickpeas or similar, or else grains of some kind.  Otherwise it doesn't hold together, basically.  For better or for worse, the First Mate doesn't have some of the additional higher up ingredients that are in other dry food.  If you look at the Orijen foods, for example (also made in Canada), they have many more ingredients.  Their starches are lentils, chickpeas, etc.  I honestly don't know anymore what is best in terms of all those types of things that bind the kibble together.  I'd personally stay far away from corn/wheat/rice, but Nature's Logic uses millet, for example, and they are extremely deliberate in choosing that ingredient vs potatoes or such, even though it is grain and thus they can't stamp the grain-free buzzword on the package.  

Now what I find odd is that it has potatoes in the canned food.  That is simply unnecessary, although it may make the consistency of the food more appealing for some cats.  I was a bit miffed when I found the same thing with Lotus.  A new to me recently (open only a couple years) local store owner was gaga over Lotus (as many others have been for a long time) and I bought a couple cans from her anyway.  She recounted how she had to go through a totally different distributor  from some of her other stuff to get it, and oddly it has since shown up in a couple of other local stores so I guess that distributor is making a push here.  Everyone thinks Lotus is a great company and so on but I do think it's odd that there is potato or tapioca or similar in all their cans.

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PushPurrCatPaws said:

The "FirstMate Chicken Meal with Blueberries Formula Limited Ingredient Diet Grain-Free Dry Cat Food" is about 1/2 inch in length, not pea-sized, just FYI. It is a dry food that is not a rounded little kibble bit, but one of those three-pronged type of kibble shapes. (Does that make sense?)

I feed my kitten several kinds of canned foods of various other brands for her main food intake, but I do use this dry food just as training treats. She flips out over the taste, and so it works well during training.

By the way, I did find this post about the canned versions of FirstMate. I cannot vouch for its accuracy as I have not called the company myself, but it might be worth verifying:
http://www.felinediabetes.com/FDMB/threads/firstmate-canned-cat-foods-s.126964/

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PushPurrCatPaws said:

Samples are the way to go, if you can manage it! I got little sample bags from the pet food store where I shop. I've yet to buy a full bag, since I only use this food for limited training purposes.

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