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I was sitting at my desk doing one of those things business journalists do, streaming an investor conference, when I heard something that made me giggle.
“We have seen good structural growth in cat,” said Philipp Navratil, the chief executive of Nestlé.
Structural growth in cat? He went on. Many more people were adopting cats than dogs.
“We like cats a lot because cats are also picky eaters,” he said, adding that this worked to Nestlé’s advantage because the company had the scientific resources to understand and cater to the taste buds of cats.
I had a lot of questions.
I was surprised that many more people were choosing cats over dogs. I love dogs. I recently read cover to cover a book called “Be More Dog: Life Lessons From Our Canine Friends,” a gift from a dog-loving friend. But Mr. Navratil’s comments, I learned, were true.
The number of cat-owning households grew at a rate three times as fast as that of dog-owning households from 2021-25, according to a Euromonitor survey. The hypothesis is that people are spending more time in the office these days, and cats are lower maintenance.
Maybe, but cats are decidedly not lower maintenance when it comes to food. Curious about how, exactly, researchers determine which flavors are most appealing to dogs and cats, I set out to explore the business of pet food at a time when people are spending more on their animals and have more options.
I began my reporting in June with a trip to Switzerland to the headquarters of Nestlé, which owns the pet food company Purina. I watched the company present a pyramid-shaped mousse with cascading gravy, part of Purina’s premium food line.
“Cats love gravy,” one Purina employee said, calling the dish “an elevated experience for the cat and cat parent.”
In an interview, Dan Smith, who works in strategy for Purina, told me about the investments the company was making to understand what flavors cats like and even how they bite their food. (Note from Jenny’s editor, a cat guy: Anyone familiar with cats knows they chomp food with their heads at an angle.) People are having fewer children and having them later, if at all, and are willing to spend more money to keep their pets happy.
“I had grand-dogs before I had grandkids,” Mr. Smith said.
I began thinking of the ideal setting for a story about the picky palates of our pets. Should I find the place with the highest number of cats per capita? Turkey? Poland, one of the countries where Nestlé saw the most growth potential? My editor suggested I find out if big pet food companies had special facilities to research animal palates.
I asked around, and Royal Canin, which is owned by Mars, invited me to their pet center, home to 377 cats and dogs, in southern France. This was shaping up to be a dream assignment.
I arrived at Royal Canin’s pet center, near Montpellier, in September. Dozens of small dogs of various breeds were barking and running around outside. One dog watched the others from an elevated training platform, while two others played in the shade. Around the corner, a corgi puppy and three Beaucerons were jumping in and out of a swimming pool. An employee told me the pool was “for dogs, by dogs,” although I didn’t quite know what to make of that.
On a video call, a feline expert explained to me why cats love tuna — it has the perfect combination of the umami flavor profile that cats savor. Only about 40 percent of the dogs and the cats that live at the Royal Canin pet center participate in taste tests, and the rest participate in studies involving their health. The members of the select group have shown they can distinguish between palatable and less palatable food.
Dogs of certain breeds that are less discerning, such as Labradors, don’t make the cut, said Silvia Miret-Catalan, vice president of research and development at Royal Canin. (My partner’s dog, Taya, a Swedish Vallhund mix who has eaten poop on more than one occasion, would almost certainly be ineligible.)
To qualify for Purina’s taste tests, dogs and cats also have to show they have “polite feeding behaviors,” such as not flipping over bowls at mealtimes, in the case of dogs, said Annie Valuska, a pet behaviorist at Purina, which also conducts palatability tests. Experts study the way cats approach a bowl, whether they purr before or while eating and the extent to which they paw, said Catherine Cartier, the research director of Nestlé Purina Europe.
Royal Canin’s dog taste tests last about 15 minutes, but cat taste tests stretch for hours. At the pet center, I observed A/B kibble tests and hoped a serious-looking cat named Virgule (“comma” in French), a Ragdoll cat, would eat some food from either Tray A or Tray B, rather than just stare at me. She just stared.
Experts emphasized that while kibble tests can provide useful conclusions about the preferences of cats of different ages and breeds, no one rule fits all cats.
Or, as one reader put it in a comment after my article published, “can someone tell my cat that he’s supposed to like tuna?”
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