How to add fresh food to your cat’s kibble?

Not everyone might be able to feed a homemade diet to their cats, for many possible reasons. It could be an issue of budget, not enough space in the freezer to store the food, or lack of time to prepare the food. However, even if you can’t feed a fully homemade diet to your cats, you can still improve their diet by adding some fresh food. In this article, I will explain how you can easily feed some fresh food to your cat without making their diet unbalanced.

Why add some fresh food to your cat’s diet?

The first reason to add fresh food to your cat’s diet is to provide some form of enrichment. In fact, for many cats, eating every day the same kibble can get pretty boring: this explains why they often lose interest in their food. Rotating between different fresh foods helps to make their meals less monotonous.

Diversifying its food also helps your cat to be less picky and prevents it from getting addicted to a single type of cat food. It can also make the gut flora of your cat more diverse, meaning that your cat will be more tolerant to changes in its food.

Fresh food is also much richer in water than kibbles. In fact, while kibbles contain less than 10% water, meat contains around 60-70% water, and vegetables even more with 90% water. So, adding fresh food is a good way to provide extra hydration to your cat if you can’t feed a fully wet diet. This is crucial as cats eating a dry diet have a lower overall water intake than cats eating a wet diet.

As I have explained in the article on the benefits of raw feeding, adding some unprocessed or minimally processed food to a kibble or canned food-based diet (ultra-processed foods) can bring some of the benefits of raw feeding.

Finally, adding fresh food can simply be a first step before fully transitioning to a homemade diet! That way you can know more about your cat's taste and get a better idea of how to organize yourself if you plan to later feed a homemade diet.

How much food can you add?

When you feed a commercial diet such as kibble, the diet is balanced and complete, meaning that it provides all the nutrients your cat needs. So, when you replace part of the diet with fresh food like meat, you risk unbalancing your cat's current diet. In fact, as explained in this article, meat alone isn't a balanced diet for cats, which is why homemade diets include several ingredients like meat, raw meaty bones, organs, fish, and supplements.

That's why when adding fresh food to a balanced diet, you should limit it to only a small part of the diet, ensuring you don't unbalance the overall diet.
You can find recommendations stating that you can replace up to 10%-20% of the calories.

If your cat eats only kibble, this means removing 10-15g of kibbles; if your cat eats only canned food, this means removing 30-50g. And if you replace it with lean meats, you can add 25-40g of meat.
Below is a table to help you determine how much food to add based on the ingredient.
Additionally, when you first start adding fresh food to your cat's diet, always begin with small quantities and gradually increase to 10% to 20% of the calories.

What fresh food can you feed?

Meat

You can feed the same meat as in a raw diet, and you can find the list and details in this article. Depending on your cat's preference, you can serve the meat raw or lightly cooked; if you cook the meat, opt for a gentle cooking method such as steaming or boiling.
Choose lean meat, as it has fewer calories, allowing you to feed your cat more than fattier cuts of meat. Examples of lean meat include poultry without skin, veal escalope, and beef chuck stew meat.

Vegetables

While vegetables are plant matter, they can still have benefits for cats and make an interesting addition to kibble or canned food. In fact, vegetables are low in starch and high in water, making them an excellent way to add extra hydration. Some other benefits of vegetables include their content of phytonutrients, such as beta-carotene or flavonoids. These compounds are noteworthy as they can have antioxidant properties, lower the risk of cancer, and exhibit anti-inflammatory effects, among others. Additionally, vegetables easily increase the volume of food that your cat consumes while providing very few calories, making them ideal for overweight cats. Since they are low in calories, you can feed your cat anywhere from 30g to 150g, depending on their tolerance for fiber.

I recommend steaming or boiling the vegetables and then puréeing them to break down the fibers and make them easily digestible.
Examples of vegetables you can use include zucchini, carrots, broccoli, green beans, pumpkin…

Heart and other organs

Heart and other taurine-rich organs or muscles like tongue, lung, and gizzard are interesting to feed as they are generally cheaper than muscle. All these cuts have in common that they are particularly rich in taurine and generally higher in iron and zinc than muscle meat. Like for meat, you can feed them raw or gently cooked.

Eggs and quail egg

Eggs are an interesting addition because they have very high-quality proteins and are rich in choline and lecithin, which can help with hairballs. However, eggs can be rich in fat, so introduce them gradually to avoid diarrhea. I would also recommend giving quail eggs rather than chicken eggs, as the size is more convenient for cats.

Eggs can be fed raw or soft-boiled if your cat tolerates it better; however, do not feed exclusively raw egg white, as it contains an enzyme that inhibits biotin, an important vitamin.

Add occasionally

Some ingredients should be added only occasionally to your cat's diet, as they are high in certain nutrients and risk unbalancing the diet if fed daily.

Raw meaty bones

Raw meaty bones are rich in calcium and phosphorus, two very important nutrients that must be provided in a certain ratio. So regularly adding raw meaty bones could unbalance your cat's diet. However, raw meaty bones can be beneficial for your cat's oral health as they can help reduce tartar buildup. For this reason, you can add raw meaty bones occasionally to kibble or canned food, one or two times a week.

Examples of raw meaty bones include quail, rabbit ribs, or chicken necks; you can find more details on which raw meaty bones are appropriate for cats in this article.

Fish & Seafood

Small oily fish are rich in omega-3, particularly the fatty acids EPA and DHA, as well as vitamin D. Adding omega-3 to your cat's diet can be beneficial since manufacturers are not required to add EPA and DHA to kibble or canned food, even though these fatty acids are essential for cats. If the food you feed your cat does not already contain fish oil or fish, you can add small oily fish as fresh food 2 to 3 times a week.
However, to avoid excess vitamin D and because too much omega-3 isn't good, you shouldn't feed it every day in addition to a complete and balanced diet.

Examples of small oily fish that can be fed raw or canned in spring water include sardines, mackerel, salmon, rainbow trout, herring, and sprats. To learn more about which fish you can feed and the precautions to take before feeding raw fish (it must be frozen for at least 7 days), read this article.

Mussels are rich in omega-3 while being less caloric than small oily fish. So they are another great way to add omega-3 EPA and DHA to your cat's diet.
It's recommended to feed the mussels cooked, and you can often find them in supermarkets already steamed and individually frozen, which makes them very convenient to feed.

Fish oil

While fish oil, such as sardine oil or salmon oil, is a popular addition to kibble, it's not something I would recommend as a first choice. In fact, since fish oil is an oil, it's very dense in energy, so you could easily end up feeding too many calories to your cat, potentially leading to obesity. While, like fish, fish oil is beneficial for providing EPA and DHA, its richness can easily result in providing too much omega-3, which isn't good either.
Lastly, fish oil can go rancid very quickly, and in some cases, it can already be rancid when you buy it. That's why it's more interesting to use fish rather than fish oil.

Do not add

Here are some ingredients that you should not add to your cat's kibble or canned food.

Liver and cod liver oil

Liver is very rich in vitamin A, and kibble already provides enough vitamin A for your cats. So feeding liver will supply additional vitamin A, which could put your cat at risk of hypervitaminosis.

Cod liver oil is extremely rich in both vitamin A and vitamin D. Just like vitamin A, an excess of vitamin D can be dangerous, so it's better to avoid feeding cod liver oil.

Ingredients without much nutritional interest

Some other foods aren't going to be dangerous if you add them to your cat's diet, however, they don't have much nutritional value.
As already mentioned in the article about fat and fatty acids, olive oil and coconut oil do not provide essential fatty acids. Additionally, as they are oils like fish oil, you can easily end up feeding too many calories.

To conclude, there are many different ways to add fresh food to your cat's diet, so don't hesitate to vary between the different possibilities. You also don't have to stick to adding only meat or only vegetables for a day. Of course, this list isn't exhaustive, and there are other foods you can add to your cat's diet. Just be sure they are non-toxic and keep in mind the calorie amount.

Fresh food to add to your cat's diet

Category	Example of cuts	How much you can feed?
Lean meat or organs	chicken breast, beef chuck stew meat, turkey breast, pork tenderloin, veal escalope, venison, beef heart, beef lung, chicken gizzard.	25 - 40 g
Meat or organs moderate in fat	chicken breast with skin, ground beef 10%, pork leg shank, turkey thigh with skin, chicken heart	20 - 35 g
Fatty meat or organs	ground beef 20%, lamb shoulder chop, duck breast, beef tongue, lamb tongue	10 - 15 g
Vegetables	zucchini, carrots, broccoli, green beans, pumpkin	30 - 100 g
Egg	quail egg, chicken egg	1 quail egg or 1/3 chicken egg
Occasionally
Fish	salmon, sardine, mackerel, herring, mussel...	15 - 25 g
Raw meaty bones	quail, chicken neck, chicken wings	20 - 30g
Fish oil	sardine oil, salmon oil, anchovy oil, algae oil	1-2 mL

The quantity of an ingredient correspond to 30 to 50 calories, which represents 20% of an average cat daily calorie requirement.
If your cat eats kibble, remove 10-15g of kibbles.

Sources for the table

USDA
CIQUAL