We recently had the opportunity to try some of the new products from Nature’s Variety.
Pride by Instinct
The first one we sampled was the new Pride by Instinct line of grain free canned foods. These are in colorful cans, and each flavor has a whimsical character assigned to it. This seems kind of silly at first, but if you happen to have a member of your household who gets sent to the store for cat food and has a hard time remembering which one to purchase, the silly characters like the glasses-wearing diva cat on the Diva’s Duck flavor probably would help ensure the correct flavor comes home. These are the four flavors we tried:
Two of the flavors, rabbit and chicken, are “flaked” while rabbit and duck are “minced.” (All flavors come in both textures, and there are a few more available too. You can check out the full line at their site, if you’re curious.) These seemed to be similar consistency in the sense that both of them allowed pate-loving cats to eat the sauce first and then decide whether or not they were actually going to eat the bulk of the meal.
Newton!
The flaked texture seemed to be slightly larger pieces, as pictured below.
NEWTON! He is ready to give the food his seal of approval before it is even served.
Since Ashton’s calorie intake is still limited, we had the boys vote on these cans:
Starlet’s Salmon Recipe – Pierre: Paws up! Newton: Paws up! Pierre loves fishy foods and doesn’t get them often. It was clear that he thought this one, especially, was a real treat.
Champ’s Chicken Recipe – Pierre: Paws up! Newton: Paws up!
Diva’s Duck Recipe – Pierre: Paws down. Newton: Paws up! Pierre is a picky eater, so this isn’t surprising.
Ritzy’s Rabbit Recipe – Pierre: Paws down. Newton: Paws down. We haven’t ever had rabbit before, and at first we thought that was the cause. Looking more closely at the label, it turns out that this is really a pork-based food with some rabbit in it (top ingredients pork broth, rabbit, pork, pork liver). Pork isn’t a food that the boys are familiar with at all, so it’s understandable that they would have approached it with caution. .
We like that the recipes are grain free, and are happy that there is no carrageenan anywhere on the ingredient list, too. Although the foods are grain-free, they do have peas and spinach listed high enough on the ingredient lists to be less than ideal. Still, Pierre’s enthusiasm for the Starlet’s Salmon recipe when he hasn’t been eating very well recently is something we are pleased to discover.
Instinct Raw Freeze Dried Meal or Mixer
One of the new Nature’s Vareity products is a freeze-dried raw. We were really excited to try this because we are hoping that now that the transition from kibble to canned is complete to eventually make the transition from canned to raw.
The pieces of this freeze-dried food are roughly the same size and shape as kibble, so cats who are accustomed to kibble might be more likely to accept it than they would other raw. All three of us still think that kibble is addictive, and we took to this just like it was kibble.
It can be fed as a complete meal, or sprinkled on top of other food as an enhancer. Or, as Pierre quickly determined, it could be a tasty mid-day snack.
Pierre dove so enthusiastically into the bag of Instinct Raw that he actually got it stuck on his head and had to shake it off. Do not try this at home! Considering he hasn’t been eating well recently and has had us worried, this was exciting to see.
Also, since this food is so well-accepted all around, it seems like a really good gateway into raw feeding. This is an exciting discovery for the cats who mostly didn’t recognize a raw diet as real food the last time we tried it, and we hope it helps us work on the transition to a species-approriate raw diet.
FTC Disclosure: We received this sample food free from Nature’s Variety. All opinions expressed in this review and on this site are our own.
