Tastier cat food flavours for our feline friends

Cats are notoriously picky eaters. But what if humans could design their foods around flavours that our feline friends are scientifically proven to enjoy?

Researchers publishing in ACS’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry used a panel of cat taste-testers to identify favoured flavour compounds in a series of chicken liver-based sprays. The cats particularly enjoyed the sprays that contained more free amino acids, which gave their kibble more savoury and fatty flavours.

Cats have a more acute sense of smell than humans, and the aroma of their food plays a big role in whether they’ll eat or snub what their owner serves for dinner. Feline palates are also more sensitive to umami (savoury) flavours than humans and they can’t taste sweetness. While meat-flavoured food attractant sprays can help improve the scent and tastiness of dry cat biscuits, the exact correlation between volatile flavour compounds and palatability is not well understood.

Head researcher Shiqing Song and colleagues relied on the expertise of a panel of 10 hungry adult cats to evaluate a series of food sprays containing different volatile flavour compounds.

To prepare their fragrant sprays, the researchers homogenised and heat-treated chicken livers. Then, they broke down proteins in the liver paste to various degrees using enzymes to produce four different food attractants.

Song’s team identified over 50 different flavour compounds across the sprays, ranging from tropical and floral to sweaty and rubbery.

For the taste test, the researchers coated commercially available cat food with chicken fat and then sprayed it with one of the four chicken liver attractants. The samples were presented to the cats alongside a control food treated with a different, commercially available attractant. The team observed which bowl the cats chose first and how much food they ate throughout the day.

The researchers found that most cats preferred and ate more of the foods sprayed with their attractants, particularly the sprays with proteins that were further broken down by the enzymes and contained more free amino acids.

These compounds are important flavour precursors that can undergo the Maillard reaction (a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars to create melanoidins, the compounds which give browned food its distinctive flavour), which likely produced many different aroma-enhancing compounds during the heat treatment step.

The favoured foods contained more mushroom and fatty flavours as well, while the less-enjoyed foods featured acidic and sweet-tasting compounds, possibly because fewer Maillard reactions occurred.

The findings could help with future cat food formulations.

Image credit: iStock.com/dimarik