A panel of feline taste testers are helping scientists identify unique flavor ingredients that could revolutionize the way we formulate cat food for our slim balls.
Cat sitting on a windowsill, eating. (Credit: Carsondale / CC BY-SA 3.0)
Is your cat a picky eater? If you live with cats, then you know that getting them to eat can be a common problem. Cats have a keener sense of smell than humans, and the smell of their food plays a big role in whether they will eat it. Studies show that the cat’s palate is also more sensitive to umami (savory) tastes than humans and cannot 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 Fragrance 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 cat taste testers to evaluate a series of food sprays containing different volatile flavor compounds.
The scientists prepared their edible sprays by homogenizing and heat-treating chicken livers. They then break down the proteins in the liver paste using enzymes to produce four different food attractants. Scientists identified more than 50 different flavor compounds from the sprays, ranging from tropical and floral to sweaty and rubbery.
The cat panel taste-tested commercially available cats, which the researchers coated in chicken fat and then sprayed with one of four chicken liver attractants they had formulated. This was presented to feral cats along with 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 during the day.
The researchers found that cats preferred food with scented sprays that contained more free amino acids, which gave their treats more of a pleasant, fatty taste.
“Preferred foods contained more mushroom and fatty flavors,” the researchers noted in their study. In contrast, foods with a more acidic composition and a sweet taste were less popular among the cat taste testers.
Although attractive meat-flavored food sprays can help improve the aroma and taste of dry cat treats, the exact correlation between volatile flavor components and palatability is not well understood. This work can help inform future cat food formulations and increase your chances of choosing a kibble that your poor cats might like.
But seriously; who cares what cats think of their food? Understanding what flavors cats prefer to eat can lead to the development of tastier foods and reduce food waste, ensuring cats get the right nutrition – and this can translate into a longer life and healthier with fewer visits to the vet.
So designing palatable cat foods is a tricky balancing act: formulating a food that cats will actually eat is, of course, crucial, but its nutritional balance must be just as important. Hopefully, future research will focus on combining favorite cat flavors with optimal nutritional profiles to create cat foods that are both delicious and nutritionally complete.
Source:
Yuyan Wei, Ling Xie, Bertrand Muhoza, Qian Liu and Shiqing Song (2024). Generation of odorant compounds in cat food attractants: chicken liver-derived protein hydrolysates and their contribution to palatability, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 72(28) | doi:10.1021/acs.jafc.4c02871
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