Trader Joe's Turkey & Giblets Dinner Premium Cat Food--reconsidered

I discussed all three varieties of TJ's canned cat food two years ago, here.

Back then, I settled on Newman's Own brand for my Lucy. I stuck with that for quite a while, but then started doing a lot of experimenting with different brands, trying to find one that was higher in protein and lower in fat. Lucy tended to be OK with some of the products for a while, then sour on them. For about a year now, though, we've both been happy with giving her this stuff from Nutro/Max Cat.

But recently there has been a huge change in the cat scene around here. I got a second cat, Oliver:

Oliver's tastes are quite different from Lucy's. At first he seemed to be an omnivore, willing to gobble down anything I put in front of him. The cat-food field was wide open.

You might think the obvious choice is to give him the same thing I give Lucy. But there are reasons not to. First, it's expensive--especially because I've learned, with weight monitoring, that Oliver's caloric needs are a lot higher than Lucy's. Second, he has no teeth (long story), and Lucy's food comes in big chunks. He really needs a pate style. Third, ideally I'd prefer them each to get a food that the other won't eat, so that I don't have to worry about whether one is stealing the other's food without my knowing about it.

Lisa Pierson is a veterinarian who is passionate about good nutrition for cats. She compiled the 2012 table of commercial cat foods that I relied on previously. Earlier this year she updated it for 2017, here.

I culled that list of hundreds of wet foods down to 40 that met all the parameters most important to me, then narrowed it down to two that I thought best. I bought six cans of each for Oliver, the previous omnivore--and he turned up his nose at both of them! These were genuinely premium products, some of the most expensive available. (We're talking more than $2/can.) But you know what he loves? Trader Joe's Turkey & Giblets--a real steal at just $0.79/can.

Its nutritional parameters haven't changed between Dr. Pierson's 2012 chart and the 2017 chart.

First, you want less than 10% of calories to be from carbohydrates. This has 9%--not quite as low as I'd prefer, but acceptable.

After that, you want the highest possible percentage of calories to be from protein. There are a couple of brands that have real standouts in this category (Tiki Cat and Weruva), but those are all shredded, not pate. I tried a can on Oliver, and he seemed to have difficulty eating it, what with the toothlessness. The best pates go over 35% of calories from protein; the worst are down around 25%. Lucy's food is an outstanding 40%. TJ's is 32%. Not quite as good, but not bad.

Then you want a low phosphorus level, because excessive phosphorus is hard on the kidneys. I'd like under 300; TJ's Turkey & Giblets is better than average, at just 235.

So it's nutritionally acceptable, cheap, and Oliver loves it. I'll keep Lucy on the Nutro (unless she starts rejecting it, as she has other previous favorites before), but it looks like Oliver is going to be a Trader Joe's cat. (I already bought him his own Double Wide Scratcher, and he loves it.) I expect to save over $600/year getting him this instead of either of the two that I had originally planned to feed him.

I concluded two years ago, "among the wet cat foods that are in that price range, you'd have a hard time finding anything of better nutritional quality, and among those in the same general range of quality of ingredients, you'd have a hard time finding anything cheaper."

I stand by that as an accurate assessment--but I think I should have worded it even more strongly: At this price point, I know of no other food that you should be willing to feed your cat, because all the others are crap. And if you look at all the ones that are comparable in nutritional quality, this Trader Joe's product costs in the range of one-half to one-third as much as most of them. It's not the absolute best in quality, and it's not the absolute cheapest in price, but nothing else on the market can touch it in terms of nutritional bang for the buck.


Will I buy it again? 

It looks like I'll be buying a lot of it. It has my recommendation--and Oliver's.

(Note: The above is not true of the other TJ's varieties. They are not as good in their nutrient profile, primarily because of higher carbohydrate content.)

Bonus Lucy picture just because she's so adorable and nobody could possibly ever have seen enough of her: 

ADDENDUM, November 20, 2017: 

Life comes at you fast.

I wrote the above last week. Since then, Oliver has started to show less enthusiasm for the Trader Joe's Turkey & Giblets than he had originally. He still eats it, but instead of snarfing it all down as fast as he can, he eats a little at first, then returns to graze on it periodically.

So I began looking at specific online prices for some of the others to experiment with. Contrary to my assertion above about Trader Joe's being uniquely cheap, I was surprised to find two others that were much cheaper than the $1.50-$2.00 that is typical for 5.5-ounce cans of cat food of what I consider acceptable nutritional quality. Both come in larger cans, which undoubtedly contributes to keeping the price down:

1. Dave's Naturally Healthy Grain Free, in either chicken or turkey varieties, comes in a case of 12 12.5-ounce cans for $23.88 from Chewy.com (and even less if you subscribe to a regularly scheduled purchase). That's 16 cents/oz, pretty close to the 14 cents/oz for Trader Joe's. At a pet store near my house, it costs $1.99 per 12.5-ounce can, which is identical to the online price.

2. Triumph brand chicken & liver comes in a case of 12 13.2-ounce cans for an astonishing low price of just $15.99, also from Chewy. That works out to just 10 cents/ounce, about 40% less than Trader Joe's, while still meeting all my nutritional parameters. I'm floored by this. The Triumph brand isn't carried by any stores in the Asheville area, so I ordered a case from Chewy. It hasn't arrived yet, so I don't know if Oliver will eat it, but I thought it was such a good potential value that it was worth ordering one case to find out.