Cat food options have improved over the past few years.  Pate, grilled, flakes, and minced offer a variety of textures for cats with textural preferences – we’re convinced our cat fits that description. She completely rejects pate, regardless of the ingredients.  Science Diet has a minced style for their mature adult cats and initially it closely resembles pate. Apparently she doesn’t see the resemblance and our cat gobbled it all up with a lot of enthusiasm. 

The image on the can looks more like flakes than what the contents actually looked like. I had picked up four cans of minced cat food and groaned thinking this pate-like food meant we had four rejections.  Quite the opposite happened. 

Science Diet’s Savory Chicken Entrée for Mature Adults (7+ years) has strong cat appeal, at least for our food-finicky feline.  The smell resembles roasted chicken or turkey. The first ingredients are water, chicken, turkey giblets, meat-by-products, and liver. It also has corn starch, corn gluten meal, and chicken fat.  It contains a lengthy list of minerals and vitamins intended to provide her with critical nutrients.  The suggested serving for a 10 pound cat is 1 ¼ to 1 2/3 cans a day if this is your cat’s primary source of food.  Our cat only gets a tablespoon or two a day along with her dry kibbles - it's more of a treat than a meal.  We don’t worry a lot about the minerals and vitamins, we only ask that the food is tasty and that it promotes healthy kidneys and that it doesn't have a detrimental effect.  The label claims this has .69% phosphorous, .069% magnesium, and .82% potassium. The 156 grams can contains approximately 168 calories. The pate-like texture is soft with some texture.  It’s not as firm as the pates our little cat has rejected.  

She eats upstairs. We have a spiral staircase that goes up to a large room used mostly for growing seedlings, storing teaching supplies and feeding our cat. It’s a large office but there is a set of built-in shelves that fit a triangular corner. This is her safe feeding station.  Our previous dogs loved eating the cat’s food and one of them was brave enough (or foolish enough) to climb the open staircase to get to the food.  We had to feed kitty up on these shelves.  You can always tell when she likes the food – she flies up the stairs and sails up to her shelf. 

Much to my surprise she races up the stairs and stands on her shelf mewing as if commanding me to hurry up.  She certainly doesn’t act like a mature adult at meal time. She likes Science Diets Savory Chicken Entrée.     As an aside, we’re a waste-not kind of family.  After our lab finishes eating from her food-dispensing ball we have a ritual of shaking out the last piece.  When done she licks the spoon that dished out the cat food.  Normally she quickly cleans it.  She used extreme caution when licking the spoon that served the Savory Chicken Entrée.  I’ve no idea if her response is due to the texture, smell, or taste, but she has been hesitant and this morning she actually walked away and left food on the spoon.  She’s a smart dog so I might be just a little concerned about this food.  

As little as she eats we’ll continue to pick up random cans of Science Diets Savory Chicken Entrée. The flavorful canned food motivates her to eat her kibbles.  Her weight tends to hover just slightly under 10 pounds and can drop to less than nine pounds with little effort. Food just isn’t her big drive in life – when we can find canned food she’ll eat and if it encourages her to also eat her kibbles we’ll continue to buy more from the same source.

Recommended: Yes