Felix Fish Selection in Jelly Pouch

When I first brought home my cat, Shadow, 5 years ago I was happy to feed him Whiskas, Felix and other supermarket cat food believing that they were high quality. I have since learned more about pet food and learned that Felix is actually a pretty low quality junk food for cats.

Even though I do have some misgivings about the quality of Felix, it is still a brand I feed to my cats on occasion. I live in the middle of nowhere and thus miles from my nearest pet shop and when I run out of cat food Felix is readily available from the local shops. It generally costs around £3.50 for a box of 12 sachets although it is frequently on special offer meaning it is more likely you will pay £3 for a pack.

One thing that I like about Felix is the packaging; each 100g pouch comes individually sealed. Each pouch is the perfect size for one meal meaning you do not have to store half opened cans of cat food. The outer packaging is a sturdy cardboard box which is easily recyclable and there are also vouchers to cut out to redeem for Felix branded gift from an online store.

Felix comes in a variety of different flavours, the fish pouches in jelly is the one my cats like the least preferring either poultry or meat. The box has 4 flavours, tuna and cod, salmon and shrimp, shrimp and plaice and Pollock and sardine. Of those, the salmon and shrimp is the cat’s favourite but they will eat all of the flavours. If I feed fish sachets daily for a long period of time then they get fussy and start to turn their noses up at them so rotating flavours is a good thing.

The cat food itself is small chunks of reformed fish in a thick jelly, you cannot make out any real pieces of fish in there. The cats really enjoy the jelly and tend to lick it off first before eating some of the chunks. It smells pretty foul to my human nose but the cats definitely like it.

Reading the list of ingredients, you will see that fish only makes up a tiny proportion of the ingredients. The Pollock and sardine flavour contains Meat and meat derivatives, fish and fish derivatives (Pollock 4%, sardine 4%), minerals and various sugars.

The meat and fish used in the pouches is likely to be low quality scraps, meat and fish derivatives means that the food contains any meat or fish unfit for human consumption and scraped from the carcass. Sugars are not good for a cat and not part of their natural diet whilst the meat is such low quality that the food needs to be fortified with artificial minerals. In other EU countries the laws concerning cat food are a lot stricter and only human quality meat may be used, the labelling laws are also stricter so you can understand exactly what grains and sugars are in the food.

I have been researching better quality cat foods lately and the difference between the really good food and Felix is stark. The better quality food smells and looks a lot nicer, the cat’s coats look better when they eat it and even their poos are nicer and less smelly. Feeding a higher quality cat food will be slightly more expensive than feeding Felix but by shopping around and using special offers then it is not much dearer and I think my cats deserve better.