Is a Food Rotation Diet Beneficial for Cats? Exploring 5 Reasons to Rotate Brands and Proteins

A food rotation diet consists of not relying on one or two pet food companies, but offering your cat a variety of brands and proteins. It's great for nutrition, enrichment and preventing finickiness.

Luke's favorite spot to eat breakfast is on the counter which is totally ok with me. I clean the counter after his meal and he doesn't come back until the next day. He eats his other meals elsewhere.

Why Provide Variety?

There are a lot of benefits to a food rotation diet and not many negatives other than it can initially take some trial and error to find foods your cat likes to eat.

1. Variety is good for optimal nutrition

Does eating one type of food provide adequate nutrition? That's definitely not how most humans eat. Nutritionists advise us to eat a varied diet with lots of different colored fruits and vegetables with proteins, healthy fats, and maybe complex carbohydrates. When living outside and depending on what's available in the area, cats might hunt for mice, birds and bugs. In certain areas, they might also eat lizards, snakes and frogs. Each pet food company does ingredients a bit differently in terms of what they use for protein, fats and added nutrients. When we use different companies and vary the proteins, it gives our cats access to a larger variety of nutrients compared with when we give them the same food all the time.

2. Enrichment - What's for dinner tonight? The same thing you had for breakfast, and the day before that, and the day before that. Really?

Varying the food contributes to enrichment. You might like to eat pizza, but would you eat it for every meal for months on end? The food your cat might have initially loved may become less appealing with time if that's the only food they have access to.

A study that came out in December 2023 showed that domestic cats eat over 2000 other species and explained that cats are generalists when it comes to diet. They are opportunistic obligate carnivores. I'm not suggesting feeding your cat 2000 species, but maybe offer more than chicken. A lot of my cats don't even like chicken and it's such a popular ingredient in cat food.

There are different ways of providing a food rotation diet such as alternating foods at each meal, or weekly, or monthly. For my cats, every meal is like Thanksgiving, with a choice of options. That's easy to do when you have 5 cats, harder with one or two. I'm currently feeding my cats an assortment of canned food and Vital Essentials freeze fried raw food.

The "Thanksgiving meal" as I call it provides options. Luke's favorite food is Weruva's Paw Lickin Chicken, but sometimes he chooses another option. Why? Maybe he's tired of it, or his body is telling him to eat something different today. Options provide cats with a feeling of control and make for less stressed cats.

I'm about to serve the "Thanksgiving Meal." Lily is checking out what's for dinner. There's 3 different cat foods on each plate for this meal.

3. Out of Stock! Or, worse, Discontinued

We saw this a lot during the height of the pandemic where certain cat foods were out of stock for a long period of time due to supply chain issues. Many pet guardians were in a panic since their pet was used to eating only one type of food and were desperately trying lots of others in order to get their pet to eat. And, every now and then, a food is discontinued. That happened to us several years ago when Nutro discontinued Max Cat, my cats favorite canned food. Luckily, that wasn't the only food they were eating. It was disappointing and frustrating since Max Cat was their favorite, but my cats were still had other options and I did not feel stressed or desperate to find an alternative.

4. Safety - possibly the best reason to use a variety of food

Pet food is recalled more frequently than I feel comfortable with. Big companies regularly recall certain products due to anything from mislabeling the food to salmonella contamination. If that's the only food you're using and your cat is exposed to something dangerous, they are more likely to be harmed by it than if they were getting a smaller amount of that food. A good resource for pet food recalls, ingredients and a lot of scary information about the pet food industry can be found at The Truth About Pet Food which is a site run by pet owners keeping tabs on the highly profitable pet food industry.

5. Preventing Finickiness

When cats are used to eating different foods, they are not necessarily as picky. If you find you have to change your cat's food due to an allergy or the food is discontinued, then it can be very challenging if you're cat has not been exposed to different types of food. Exposing your cat to a variety of food is a great way to prevent finickiness and keep stress low if you have to change your cat's food in the future.

For all of these reasons, I feed my cats a variety of brands and proteins. I look for companies that use animal protein for the majority of the ingredients, not fillers like rice, soy, and corn. As obligate carnivores, cats need animal protein as their primary source of nutrition. Labels can be intimidating so look at the first 5 ingredients. That's what's going to make up the majority of the product.

Check out my Favorite Products for great feline enrichment recommendations.

About the author: Jennifer Van de Kieft, CAFTP, FFCP, PNCC is located in Brooklyn, NY. She is certified in feline behavior and pet nutrition. She owns Cat Advocate, a feline behavior consulting company. She provides cat guardians with the strategies, tools and knowledge needed to address their cat's behavior issues. Jennifer provides virtual consultations throughout the United States.