Trader Joe's Grain Free Cat Treats With Turkey

Trader Joe's has long carried Bench & Field brand cat treats. (Lucy hated them.) But that one item has been the whole cat-treat lineup, while dog treats have proliferated. Finally, we have a second kind of cat treat, and it's TJ's-branded.

Since I haven't tasted them myself, let's bring in an expert consultant.

"What's this? These aren't my regular treats."

"Mmmm, but they're pretty tasty."

"Is that all?"

"Bring me more of these treats, unworthy hooman!"


She's had about a dozen in the last 24 hours, and she definitely likes them. It's not clear to me whether she likes them more than her regular brand, less, or about the same; I can't tell any difference in her reaction.


Will I buy it again? 

Once in a while, I suppose. But I usually buy her treats in big tubs, not small bags like this. She didn't seem to love them enough to cause me to decide to make them her staple treats.


Addendum, 2/11/20 

After living with these for a while, it's now perfectly clear that Lucy actually doesn't like them as much as her regular Temptations brand of treats. With the latter, she always--100% of the time--gobbles them up instantly. With the Trader Joe's, she usually sniffs them and walks away. She'll come back later and eat them when she gets hungrier, but she makes it clear that she is disappointed that she has not been given the good stuff.

Why do I still have any treats left? I had bought two bags initially, and gave one to Nina for her cat Loki. After trying them a few times, Loki, too, let her know that he wanted his Temptations instead. So she gave the bag back to me.

Two-cat verdict: Barely acceptable, definitely not preferred.

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.

Trader Joe's Double Wide Cat Scratcher

I noticed that Nina had one of these, and that Loki seemed to be using it frequently when he came in from his outdoor roaming.

I bought one for Lucy, rubbed into its surface a tiny bit of the catnip that comes with it, and put it out for her.

Let's see how she reacts:





Lemme tell you, that is one seriously happy kitty.

She scratches on it, she licks it, she chews it, she rolls on it, she rubs on it. She's even taken naps on it.

This is the first cat item from Trader Joe's that both Lucy and Loki have loved. On that basis, I'm going to take the unusual step of putting this in my Top Ten list.


Will I buy it again? 

If you're not clear on the answer to that, maybe you need to watch the video again.

Trader Joe's dry cat food

Trader Joe's sells three different varieties of dry cat food. Or, more precisely, Trader Joe's has sold them. I'm really not clear on whether all three are still currently available. In no particular order, these are the Whole & Natural Cat Food Formula (which I'll call "Wholesome"), the Premium Dry Cat Food With Chicken & Rice Formula ("Premium"), and the Premium Chicken Meal Formula Cat Food ("Meal").

I spent nearly a year gradually rotating my cat, Lucy, through these, along with what is generally regarded as one of the best dry cat foods on the market, the "Natural Evolutionary Diet--Chicken Recipe" from Blue Wilderness (dark blue bag).

To remind you of the surpassing beauty of the food tester for this post, here's my little girl, lying on a Trader Joe's grocery bag:

This is who we have to please. And all four products seem to do that equally well.

Lucy isn't so good with words, so my only means of judging how well she likes her food are her actions. Specifically, does she eat it all at once (good!) or eat just enough to take the edge off of her hunger, and come back later when she's hungry again (not so good)? Occasionally she has tried foods that she dislikes enough not to touch at all, but none of the ones under consideration here triggered that reaction. With all four of these products, she would sometimes eat it all at once, and sometimes do the eat-some-come-back-later thing. I could not tell any consistent pattern; it seemed pretty random which days she would do which. But the fact that no product consistently got one type of response or the other suggests to me that she deemed them all about equally fit to eat.

How do they compare nutritionally? Let's take the Blue Wilderness as the standard for comparison. Its first three ingredients are deboned chicken, chicken meal, and turkey meal. It contains no poultry by-products and no grains. It is 40% protein, 18% fat.

The first ingredients in "Wholesome" are chicken meal, brown rice, and whole oats. It is 32% protein, 20% fat.

With "Premium," it's chicken meal, ground rice, and ground corn. 32% protein, 14% fat.

Finally, with "Meal," it's chicken meal, ground whole corn, and wheat flour, with 30% protein, 18% fat.

In short, all of the three TJ's products are significantly inferior to the Blue Wilderness. Of course, they're also hugely cheaper.

For more than a year now, Lucy's vet has been urging me to stop feeding her dry cat food at all. This is not based on some particular problem Lucy has; she is, I'm happy to report, perfectly healthy. But the vet explained that for a variety of reasons, dry cat food just is not good for cats. It's a lecture the vet delivers to all of her clients.

I was skeptical of this at first. After all, vets, like other professionals, can develop idiosyncratic opinions that don't necessarily line up nicely with what the science actually shows. But her urgency on this point prompted me to look into it on my own, and I have become convinced that she is correct.

Dry food is a lot cheaper than canned, and it brings with it substantial advantages in mess and convenience for the owner. But it's not better for the cat. All dry cat foods include large amounts of carbohydrates, which cats just can't process well. Their natural diet of mice, birds, and other small animals is basically protein and fat, with very little carbohydrate. Wet food also forces a certain minimum amount of water, which house cats typically drink too little of.

And so, after months of contemplation, procrastination, self-justification, and dithering, back in February I finally made the big change. Lucy had been getting dry food in the morning,  canned food at night, and I switched her from that regimen to all canned food. Specifically, it's "Fowl Ball" from Weruva, which Lucy loves. Among all canned cat food, it's comparatively high in protein, low in fat, and low in carbs. (See here for a detailed discussion of what you should look for in cat food, plus a downloadable spreadsheet comparing commercial products on those most important parameters.)

I keep some of the Blue Wilderness dry around for rare occasions, such as when I'm going to be gone for two feedings in a row; I can put out a bunch of it, so Lucy can graze on it through the day as she sees fit. That way, I don't worry that she's going hungry waiting for my late arrival. Or when I'm away for a few days and somebody else is taking care of her, the dry is easier to deal with. But her mainstay is now something that I think is just about the highest quality cat food I can provide for her, given the limitations of (1) reasonable cost and (2) her fairly picky palate.


Will I buy it again? 

No. In February, after I finally made the big switch, I took the leftovers to a local animal shelter.

I'm not trying to be prescriptive or dogmatic about what every other cat owner should do. I'm well aware that cats can be extremely willful animals, who won't necessarily agree to like or even tolerate what their humans think they should. There's also a huge variety of circumstances--financial and otherwise--in which cats are cared for, so I make no pretense to having the universal answer. However, even if you have made a thoughtful, informed decision to have part or all of your cat's diet be dry food, you can do much better than any of the Trader Joe's offerings.

Trader Joe's Premium Cat Food

Trader Joe's has three varieties of canned cat food "dinners." They also sell their own brand of dry cat food, which I have not purchased.

My cat, Lucy, has basically four different reactions to cat food. (1) Loves it and snarfs it down immediately. (2) Likes it, eats about half immediately, the rest later. (3) Meh, which means she sniffs at it and walks away, hoping that I'll get her something better, but if I don't, she'll come back and eat it later when she gets hungry enough. (4) Blech--the stuff she'd rather starve than eat.

The TJ's chicken/turkey/rice gets a reaction (2). The turkey/giblets gets a type (3). The fish/salmon/rice gets a (4).

As for nutritional quality, these products are sort of in the mediocre range. They're lower in protein and higher in fat than would be ideal. See the PDF chart here if you want all the nitty-gritty details. However, they're essentially the same on those parameters as the food that constitutes the mainstay of Lucy's diet, which is Newman's Own Turkey Formula, and the TJ's cost only about half as much. All three sell for $0.79 per can.

Calling these "premium" is a stretch. OK, it's a lie. However, 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.

Will I buy it again? 

No. Lucy doesn't like any of them better than her regular food, and I don't mind the higher price of Newman's, so that's what I'm sticking with.

Nina's View

Loki says, "They tried to make me eat TJ's but I said NO NO NO." (You may remember that he likes the Tuna for Cats, though. A lot.) This stuff dries up in the dish. Enough said.

Trader Joe's Tuna For Cats

Today's post has a special guest author--my kitty Lucy (photo by Nina).

Lucy's view 

I DID NOT LIEK DIS KAT FUD. IZ FISHY

I DOAN LIEK FISHY THINGS

Y U BYE FISHY STUFF DAT I NO LIEK?


Will I buy it again? 

Take a look at that sweet face. Would you buy her food that she doesn't like? I didn't think so. Neither will I.


Oh, look--we have another special guest blogger! It's Nina's kitty-boy, Loki!

Loki's View

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM. NOM. NOM!

The fishes are good. I liek them. Moar plz. All the proteens make my furs shiny. The tastes are tasty. Why you not give me this all day every day?

In conclushun: NOM.

Trader Joe's Premium Pine Cat Litter

I should have known better. Once your cat likes a certain kind of litter box, its location, and the litter within it, you change any of those elements at your peril.

I bought the package above on a whim: I was in Trader Joe's in the late morning of a day when I knew I would later be doing a complete litter change and box cleaning. So I thought, "What a perfect time to try some different litter!" About the time I got it home and was taking the picture of it, I started thinking more clearly about the ramifications of this, and had my first "This may have been a bad idea" inkling. But I persisted nevertheless.

The first problem I noticed at home that I had failed to notice at the store was that this is not clumping litter. Usually that means that you have to throw out and completely replace the litter every two or three days. OK, I thought, so this will just be a short-term experiment.

But then I got to reading the instructions, and it turned out to be more complicated than that. These pellets are meant to dissolve in urine, so you know it's time to replace the litter when all the pellets are dissolved. I had never heard of a cat litter that worked that way. Again, though, I ignored the warning lights that this unusual scheme was flashing in my brain.

When I poured the litter into the freshly cleaned box, two more problems became evident. First, the pellets are large enough that I wouldn't be able to use standard slotted scoops to separate solid waste from the pellets. I didn't know how I would solve that problem, but decided to cross that bridge when I came to it.

Second, the directions say to spread a one-inch layer in the box. The manufacturers are apparently assuming they know the size of every litter box. They don't. The one I use for Lucy is much larger than average (in fact, it's a Sterilite storage box), because she refuses to use anything smaller. The result is that even the entire contents of the bag were insufficient to produce a one-inch depth.

Yet I carried on. Lord, what fools these mortals be.

By the time I went to bed, no business had been done in the new litter, which I knew was a portent of nighttime trouble.

Sure enough, when I got up this morning and checked the box, it was obvious that Lucy had scratched around in it, but left nothing behind. She couldn't possibly have held everything for the nearly 24 hours it had been, so I started a search of the apartment (stepping carefully) for what alternative she might have found.

I got lucky. She had settled on a box in my work area in which I keep package stuffing--air bags, Styrofoam peanuts, brown paper, etc.--that I get in boxes and then reuse when I have to ship stuff out. It was absolutely soaked with a huge amount of urine. Poor little girl must have held it as long as she possibly could in the vain hope that I would remove the abomination from her litter box.

Yet rather than visiting vengeance upon me with some ungodly mess, she had chosen the option that resulted in the least possible trouble for me--other, maybe, than using the bathtub (which would not be something she would consider acceptable). The packing materials had absorbed enough of the cat pee that it didn't soak through the bottom of the box into the carpet. I deserved far worse punishment. I got off easy.

I wasted no more time in calling an end to the experiment. I dumped the unused TJ's litter into the soiled box and took the whole mess out to the trash, then refilled the litter box with the stuff she is used to. Within a few minutes, we had a solid waste deposit, suggesting that she had uncomfortably been holding that in, too.

To be fair to TJ's, the package does warn that cats may not accept this stuff at first, and recommends a program of gradual transition. But that would mean buying more bags of it, since one was not even enough for the recommended starting depth--and with no guarantee that at the end of the process she would like it. And even if she did, it would leave me with the problem of separating the poops from the pellets. Not an insoluble problem, but one that I'd rather not deal with.

So the bag and its contents are gone, having lasted less than 24 hours before being soundly rejected by the only one whose opinion really matters. It was an epic fail in every possible way.

Maybe there are cats who will love this stuff. Lucy is not one of them.

Will I buy it again? 

Not even if I were being offered an unlimited lifetime supply for free. (Actual cost was $3.49, by the way.)

Bench & Field Holistic Natural Feline Treats

"Hey, wait just a doggone minute," I hear you saying. (I have exceptionally good hearing.) "Those are not Trader Joe's cat treats. You didn't even start the blog post title with 'Trader Joe's.'"

Estimating just from what I see on the shelves at my local TJ's, I would guess that about 95% of the items (excluding alcoholic beverages) sold there are, indeed, branded by Trader Joe's. (Who actually makes them is information that TJ's never discloses.) This particular item is one of the rare ones sold by TJ's without its own branding. So I claim it's a legitimate subject for this blog, despite the lack of the TJ's name.

If I had looked at the list of ingredients while I was in the store, I never would have purchased this. Lucy (my cat) doesn't like fish, or anything fishy. Heck, she won't even listen to Phish! And the first ingredient here is "Anchovy & Sardine Meal." So it's no surprise that she turns up her adorable little nose at these fish-shaped morsels.

Lucy has three different kinds of treats kept in my desk drawer. (OK, it's more of a cubby-hole cleverly disguised as a drawer. Whatever.) When she wants one, she sits down next to that drawer and looks up at me with begging eyes.

Would you like to see what happens when I give her one of what I call her "sardine treats" instead of one of the two kinds she actually likes? Of course you would.






(Please note that this blog is now officially "multi-media.")

Anyway, you can see that she walks away rather than stoop to eating these things. However, she always comes back later, when she's a little hungrier, and reluctantly nibbles it from the floor, before returning to her begging spot to try for something better. That's why I keep giving them to her, one a day. They are, after all, high in protein, high in omega oils, and low in carbs. I imagine that they're good for her, though what I know about cat nutrition would fit inside one of these treats. But once these are gone, I won't buy more. It's a lot more fun to give her things she actually enjoys.

Will I buy it again? 

Weren't you listening? I just answered that: No.


Addendum 

The day after I shot that little video, Lucy upped her game. She didn't even wait to sniff the treat to find out whether it was one she wanted. She apparently now recognizes which container holds the icky treats--and she walked away haughtily as soon as I brought it out.

Addendum #2 

Now it has been another several days since I wrote that, and she has stopped coming back to eat the fish treats altogether. I'm giving up on them. I'll see if Nina's cat likes them.




Bonus cat video 

If you want to see how Lucy reacts when she really likes a treat, you can amuse yourself for ten minutes with this recording of her first experience with a chunk of freeze-dried turkey meat from a company called "Whole Life." She was already a few minutes into this frenzy when I picked up my camera and started recording. Short version: She goes bonkers for it.






Nina's View 

Loki LURVES these treats, which should be no surprise since he's quite happy to eat fishy-flavored food. He likes them better than the Greenies which are his usual reward for Kitty Excellence.