Cat soup is better than the human variety but it costs a lot more

It had to happen. Despite the fact that a lot of domestic cat food is not of the best quality (or downright poor), some cat soups such as Purina’s Gourmet Crystal Soup contains a lot more meat than soup for humans but it costs 10 times more. Yes, that’s not a typo: it is 10X more expensive than the human variety.

I’ve always thought that cat food was quite to really expensive anyway. Even the average stuff, when you price it by the gram, works out to be of a similar price to human food. Well, the soup mentioned above contains 25 times more meat and costs 10 times as much as the human version according to a test by the Sun on Sunday in the UK.

As it happens, it also tastes a lot better than human soup. A food expert, Martin Isark, taste tested the Gourmet soup together with his cats Molly and Millie. Apparently he decided that it tastes better than standard soup for humans. The pricing is astronomical. The cat soup cost 90p for a 40 g packet which works out at £22.50 for a kilogram of the soup.

As for human soup, a standard variety of chicken and vegetable broth costs £4.17 a kilo. The “study” found that human soup contain between 1 and 11% chicken while the Gourmet Crystal Chicken and Vegetable Soup for cats contained 25% meat.

I’m not sure where this is going to lead us. Perhaps the pet food manufacturers are responding to criticism that their food is in general of inadequate quality. Further, the pet market is burgeoning both in the UK and in the USA. It is probably expanding in many countries. No doubt they feel that many people are affluent enough and have the motivation and desire to spend large sums of money on the highest quality pet foods.

P.S. I think the concept of cat soup is a good one as it encourages liquid intake – useful as domestic cats are generally poor drinkers. I am sure many cat owners are attracted to it for this reason.