Making Homemade Cat Food--Save Money AND Make Your Cat Happy!
"Cat food has gone up AGAIN?!"
Once upon a time, several years ago, I found myself in the cat food section at Walmart exclaiming those words, looking at new price tags which displayed that canned Fancy Feast was now 57 cents instead of 54 cents. 57 cents for 3 ounces of.....what, really??
This thought led me down a very lengthy rabbit hole (all while still standing in the cat supplies aisle) of researching whether it was worth it to switch my cat Teddy's canned food to a cheaper brand. I began wrestling with price vs. quality. After reading the ingredients on some of the cheaper brands' cans in front of me, I began Googling the nutritional value of various brands of cat food, and found this chart at catinfo.org. Not unsurprisingly, the "better" options were also the more expensive options. Then I had a lightbulb moment: "Could I just MAKE cat food?"
The results of my price analysis. What a difference! As a bonus, the container on the right holds an extra ounce--not to mention the benefit of it being fresh made. (All photos in this article are my own and previously unpublished.)
It turns out that the same veterinarian, Lisa Pierson, that runs catinfo.org also has an extremely detailed tutorial on the site, explaining how to make your own cat food with either poultry or rabbit. It's quite easy to make and it freezes well! The site is full of other helpful information, including a caution not to make your own cat food if your cat has certain health issues!
Due to copyright, I cannot reproduce the recipe here, so if you are interested in making homemade cat food after reading this, you will find the recipe I use at her link Making Cat Food. For the love of your cat(s), I highly, HIGHLY encourage you to check out her site.
As with anything on the Internet, it's best to do your own research and decide whether you agree with and trust the source. Don't take just my word for it! But her reasoning and research really made sense to me, and she sold me on the benefits of a protein- and moisture-based food that mimics what a wild cat would eat, instead of a food with reduced protein due to adding carbohydrates and vegetables.
- NOTE: You need to either own or borrow a grinder to make this version of cat food.
Feed me!
Notes on the cost savings
- For my price analysis, I used our local Kroger's usual sale price of $0.79/lb for chicken thighs, but I've gotten them as low as $0.49/lb. I also calculated the supplement cost per batch using the current prices for NOW Foods items on Amazon, for uniformity's sake. In the past, I was able to nab most of the supplements more cheaply as add-on items from Amazon.
- There is definitely a start-up cost to making cat food, due to buying the supplements and containers. But if your cat eats canned food every day, over time you'll recoup that, since the supplements last for many batches (I've still got the original bottle of taurine I bought in the beginning) and the containers are reusable. To illustrate that point, homemade cat food costs me around $47.45 (minus the start up cost) per year. Fancy Feast would cost $104.03. Within one year I had already more than recouped those start up costs! Need I say more?
- That's 182.5 cans per year that I alone am not buying...think of all those metal cans saved from the recycling bin or trash!
- I like to double the recipe, using a 6 lb "family pack" of chicken thighs, because that results in around 25 4-oz containers of finished cat food. I feed Teddy half a container per day (he still gets some dry kibble to nibble on, too), so a double batch lasts me 7 weeks. The process may be pretty easy, but it is still a process resulting in dishes to wash, so why not cut the number of times you do it in half, at least? :)
Below are some pictures I took while processing the last batch of cat food I made, plus a few tips based on my experience over time.
If you're like me and don't want to dissolve and then squeeze fish oil capsules by hand, position them in scissor blades, lower them under the water, and cut them in half (so they won't squirt you with stinky oil!) I've already added the egg yolks to the water, here.
I tend to flip (and therefore shorten) Dr. Pierson's process, by mixing up the supplements while the chicken bakes. Here, the bowl on the right holds all the baked chicken thighs, and it's where I'm putting back the skin and bones from the thighs from which I'm removing the meat. The bowl on the left is holding the chunks I'm cutting up.
Ready to head over to the grinder. Bowl on the right holds the poultry that will run through the grinder. Bowl on the left will catch everything coming out of the grinder.
If you read the recipe at the link provided, you'll notice I don't have liver in these pictures. Teddy HATES liver. It's his line in the sand and I cannot by any means induce him to eat it--so that's why I still feed him some dry kibble too, instead of switching him 100% over to this food.
Oh, okay, here you go Teddy
Beginning to grind the thighs
Run the egg whites through too, to break them up. Not pictured is how after grinding the meat and egg whites, I also pour the supplement mixture down the chute to flush out any extra meat and egg bits. Throw away any bones left behind in the grinder!
Everything is completely mixed and I'm dividing it up into the freezer containers.
Somebody is excited....After watching the entire process, Teddy knows the last step is getting some of the FRESH FOOD in his dish!
Teddy absolutely loves this! Hopefully your cat will, too <3
We haven't got cats, but do have dogs and we have made our food for our dogs over the past couple of years. It has greatly decreased our cost of feeding the boys, decreased the amount of "waste" from our harvested game and increased all sorts of happiness and the health of our dogs.
You have provided a great service to cat lovers and people trying to be more frugal on steemit. Great share, quality content from you every time. Thank you!
Wow, thank you!! Did you find a good recipe online for your dogs' food? Or did you make one up? When I started making cat food, I did a little research on dog food but didn't find one that wasn't really complicated and/or cost efficient to make. We'd love to put the waste game meat to good use that way!
Well it started off that I was purchasing the raw diet stuff from the petfood store. So I took the percentages of what ingredients they used for their product and just use similar amounts in the ones that I make. So here's how I do it:
I Rex, my greatpyrenees/black lab eat's a half pound of raw meat per meal. (I've only used deer and moose venison). He weighs about 85 pounds. We feed the boys twice per day.
I give them one half fruits and vegetables of what they eat for meat. So in Rex case, he gets four ounces of frozen vegetables.
The reason I specify frozen is a solution also
With the different plants that we have in our garden there's more than we can use. When things like squash need to be used, I dice them up and chuck them in the freezer. Things like brussels sprout leaves and other plants that can be eaten, but just need to be trimmed back can also be frozen.
-Here's the important part about this: Dogs digestive tracts are much shorter than ours, and so they can't digest the nutrition from plants unless it's already partially been digested by something else (you know, just like how God made them, to hunt something down and eat it) - The process that takes place in the animals stomach breaks down the cell membranes and makes those nutrients available to the dogs digestion. if you freeze the vegetables and fruits the cell membrane breaks down as it freezes and the same benefit occurs for the dogs digestion.
Then when hunting season rolls around and we have gotten our game we take the meat that we won't eat: like the stuff with all the gnarly tendons and layers of grisle (sp?) and the organs (I can't bring myself to use the lungs, and won't be convinced they're good for my dogs) and weigh it out.
8 ounces meat
4 ounces fruits and vegetables
two tablespoons of bone meal (anyone that can tell me how to DO this would be my hero, we currently purchase it from the same petfood store).
The bone meal is good for their digestion, like fiber for us and a few other ways that I don't feel I need to describe on here at risk of being super gross.
There's a few other uses of the game that are quite nice if you aren't trophy hunters. You can cut the ears off, dehydrate and they're great snacks for the dogs, or chew toys depending on the size ;)
The ribs can be cut in half and served in chunks of two ribs whole to a dog 45 pounds (our other dog, Mumin) up to twice a week for a meal. They eat the whole thing. Rex is a rescue and doesn't have the best genes perhaps? so he can't digest the ribs quite so well and gets sick when he eats them, so he gets something else.
I need to note the carbohydrate consideration also... vegetables have different values for nutrients so a blend is best. We have berries by the truckload here, but can't always feed them to the boys because they'd get too fat! They really love beans in there.
If you have any questions or anything - just let me know!
Wow, that's awesome! Thank you for explaining all that!! Looks like the Husband would have to take a herd of deer just for the dogs though if we were going to make that work. They're kind of on the small side around here. I doubt he'd complain about the excuse to do more hunting :)))
I'm glad to hear from someone who has tried the homemade raw diet solution for their dogs and has had it work out well. Gives me hope that we can integrate it in the future! Thanks so much for sharing!
I recently took on a client who farms cattle. He said they have a ton of "waste" from when they butcher. My thought is that if one of them would make their waste mine it would help. We are currently able to take a moose two out of three years, so that helps with the amount of meat we collect for sure.
That's such a good idea! I used to make my own but my 'now' cat is rather picky and only really likes dry food. She even turns her nose up at steak lol
Teddy won't eat steak either! I tried giving him a tiny piece on time and he stared at it in puzzlement, then started tentatively batting it around like "is this a new toy or something?" Hahaha! Ohhhhh picky cats :-)))
Fancy Feast is cheap compared to what I am feeding right now! The thing is, Yuan is allergic to poultry and fish. So that limits what I can feed him at all! I think I looked at that site before when I was trying to get them to try raw foods (Maggie will eat Rad Cat brand raw turkey formula, nothing else. Yuan will eat the freeze dried pellets IF THEY'RE STILL PELLETS but if you reconstitute them in water, you have ruined it as far as he is concerned), so I never went as far as making it myself.
Currently Yuan's kibble is venison, and his wet is rabbit and pork (pork is unusual in cat food, I know, but I think it's to balance the rabbit because rabbit is too lean otherwise; it's how it comes in the can).
Oh my, a kitty allergic to poultry and fish! :( I don't think I've ever seen pork in any cat food, now that you mention it, but I never looked at the more specialty kinds. I'm kind of giggling over Yuan only wanting to eat the pellets in pellet form. It's like Teddy and the liver. I ruined an entire batch finding out that he won't eat it.
Where do you get venison cat kibble? That's intriguing. Does Maggie eat it too or does she get something different?
Yeah, he's very food motivated so for him to give something the cold shoulder means he REALLY doesn't like it!
The venison kibble is Natural Balance limited ingredient diet, and I get it at Petco. Maggie will eat it too but right now she is eating the other kibble I bought when I had figured out no poultry but not no fish too. 😂 So her kibble is salmon.
That looks like a messy project, but well worth it! I’m sure Teddy will love you to pieces!
This may be slightly off topic, but talking about price comparisons made me want to share my little shock from the grocery store today. Normally, we try to buy the bulkiest egg cartons we can, to save money. The store used to offer 5 dozen, but now they discontinued for whatever reason. Well next best option is the dozen and a half right. I try to always look at prices when picking out my food. Dozen and a half was listed at $4.45. What?! When did eggs get so expensive?? Dozen carton, $0.99. I had to seriously study those price tags to make sure there wasn’t a mistake! Are you joking me?? My MIL suspects that the store figures they can get away charging people so much because most people don’t price compare. What a scandal...lol!
Good grief, were they super special local organic or something? That makes NO sense that the extra 6 eggs would cause that kind of price jump! I'm kind of with your MIL on suspecting the store is making a little extra off the folks who don't pay attention ;)
No, they were just generic brand regular ol’ eggs. I even looked at the price tag on the shelf to make sure that was the corresponding tag.
That's awesome! We just made this on the weekend, but the cats wouldn't really eat it. We ended up pressure canning it and now they gobble it up. I know it's not as healthy, but it's probably still better than the canned commercial stuff.
Great share!
I wonder if the pressure canning made it seem more like whatever they were used to before. Silly cats, making you add another step ;-)))
I'm not sure. We always had them on high quality kibble, but apparently you aren't supposed to give male cats dry food. They still have the dry food, but only after they eat some wet. We may try some different recipes.
Love your cat and I had cats, and one cat was Honey and she was orange and I had one grey cat named Puffer or Loxx Catt and I had a guinea pig named Oreo and another one named Ra Ra Hercules Roberto. Good work with the homemade cat food. I love natural remedies and saving money. I eat garlic each day, I'm Oatmeal Joey Arnold, and you are awesome. Good work. Too bad for the copyright of the recipe.
Why thank you!! I think Puffer is a cute cat name ;) I'm just glad that I double checked with the original author on the copyright before posting the recipe!
Haha and I had a cat named Dumb Dumb and Road Kill hehe.
The technical term for a cat’s hairball is a “bezoar.”