Cat Food Comparisons

The wet-versus-dry question is the highest-volume thing cat owners ask, and it is usually answered with opinion. It does not have to be: the corpus holds hundreds of verified labels on both sides, so the carbohydrate, protein and calorie-density gaps can simply be measured. What the data cannot settle — whether wet food prevents urinary disease — we route to a vet rather than guess.

The number every comparison here starts from

Form decides more about what a food costs to feed than brand does, and the gap is not small. Across our verified cat corpus, the median wet food costs 8.2× more per 1,000 kcal than the median dry food. Per-pound prices hide this completely, because a wet food is roughly three-quarters water.

Medians, not averages — a handful of very expensive small-bag products would drag a mean badly. Unpriced foods are excluded from the cost column but counted in the total.

Articles

• Wet vs dry cat food

  Median dry-matter carbohydrate ~5% wet against ~30% dry, across 732 and 281 verified foods.

Comparing individual foods instead? The full cat index groups every verified label by form with dry-matter protein and estimated carbohydrate on each row.