Cat food labels are regulated but they're also legitimately confusing. Here's a quick guide to what actually matters.
The Ingredient List
Ingredients are listed by pre-cooking weight, which creates the "ingredient splitting" problem: a brand can list water, chicken breast, chicken liver, and chicken heart separately — keeping each below corn — so corn doesn't appear first even though it's the dominant ingredient by dry weight. Look at the first 3–5 ingredients and assess the overall protein-to-carbohydrate balance.
Green flags: Named meat first (chicken, turkey, salmon), named fat source (chicken fat). Note that "grain-free" on its own isn't a sign of a better food. Red flags: Generic "meat" or "poultry" without species, corn syrup, BHA/BHT/ethoxyquin as preservatives.
The Guaranteed Analysis
Shows minimum protein and fat, maximum fiber and moisture. Because wet and dry food have very different moisture levels, you need to convert to "dry matter basis" to compare them meaningfully. Subtract moisture % from 100, then divide the nutrient % by the result. A wet food showing 10% protein at 78% moisture is actually 45% protein on a dry matter basis — higher than most dry foods.
The AAFCO Statement
The most important line on the label. It should say "complete and balanced" and specify life stage. Ideally it says this was "substantiated by AAFCO feeding trials" — this means real cats ate the food for 6 months under controlled conditions. "Formulated to meet" is a lower bar — it means the recipe hits minimum numbers on paper, but hasn't been tested in living animals.
