Whiskas Nutrition Facts & Ingredients: 18 Foods Compared

Whiskas is one of those cat food brands almost every cat owner has seen at least once. The purple packaging, and endless flavor options make it one of the most recognizable brands on the shelf.

But how does the food itself actually compare?

To find out, we pulled 18 of the Whiskas products that show up most often in cat food scanner Leo scans from U.S. users and took a closer look at what’s actually inside. We compared their nutrition data, ingredient lists, and the patterns that kept showing up across the range.

Whiskas Nutrition Facts at a Glance

One thing that we noticed pretty quickly: flavors don't really matter. They often have almost identical nutrition.

Most of the Whiskas wet foods we looked at listed around:

• 8–9% protein

• 2–3% fat

• 84–85% moisture

Here are a few examples:

Purrfectly Chicken

Choice Cuts Tuna

Tender Bites Beef

The two dry Whiskas foods we checked both listed:

• 35% protein

• 13% fat

• 12% moisture

Meaty Selections Chicken & Turkey

Seafood Selections Salmon & Shrimp

Most Whiskas wet foods we checked were very similar nutritionally, and the dry foods followed the same pattern.

So rather than comparing flavor after flavor, it makes more sense to look at the bigger difference: wet vs. dry Whiskas.

Wet vs. Dry Whiskas

Wet and dry Whiskas look very different on the label, but obviously, most of that comes down to water.

Wet food contains a lot more moisture, so its protein percentage looks lower.

In our comparison, the wet foods actually came out around 50–60% protein on a dry-matter basis, versus about 40% for the dry foods.

So you can't really compare the 8–9% vs. 35% numbers on the package.

What About Carbohydrates?

Well not an easy one since most U.S. Whiskas labels don’t list carbohydrates, and we couldn’t calculate them reliably for every product because some of the information needed was missing.

One retailer reports about 5.25% carbs on a dry-matter basis for the Purrfectly Chicken variety pack, but we didn’t apply that number to the rest of the range as it wasn't enough data.

The Ingredient Lists Were More Interesting Than the Nutrition Numbers

Surprisingly, the flavor on the front isn’t always the first meat in the food.

Take Choice Cuts Tuna in Sauce. You'd be right to expect tuna to be the main animal ingredient. Well, that's not the case, it's ingredient list starts with:

Water → chicken → meat by-products → wheat gluten → tuna

And this isn't the only one, here are some other examples:

Turkey in Gravy lists chicken before turkey.

Beef in Gravy lists chicken and meat by-products before beef.

And Cod & Shrimp lists chicken and meat by-products before cod and shrimp.

A Lot of Choice Cuts Recipes Use the Same Base

Many of the Choice Cuts products use a very similar base formula.

Across the Choice Cuts ingredient lists we checked, ingredients such as:

Chicken, meat by-products, wheat gluten, starch, guar gum, sodium tripolyphosphate, added coloring... showed up again and again.

So when you think about it, the main thing that changes between recipes is the ingredient linked to the flavor name.

So you might have tuna, turkey, beef or salmon on the front of the pouch, while much of the underlying recipe stays similar.

The Two Whiskas Dry Foods Are Almost Identical

We found the same pattern in the two dry Whiskas foods we checked.

Meaty Selections Chicken & Turkey and Seafood Selections Salmon & Shrimp have the same first five ingredients:

Poultry by-product meal, ground yellow corn, ground wheat, corn gluten meal, soybean meal.

They also have the exact same nutrition numbers: 35% protein, 13% fat, 4% fiber and 12% moisture.

The seafood ingredients only show up further down the list.

So across the Whiskas products we analyzed, the biggest differences were usually between product ranges, not between flavors within the same range.

Whiskas Nutrition Facts: The Bottom Line

After comparing 18 Whiskas products, the most interesting finding wasn’t that one flavor had slightly more protein than another.

It was how similar many of the recipes were once we looked past the packaging.

Products within the same range often shared the same nutrition numbers and very similar ingredient lists.

So if you’re choosing between two Whiskas products, the name on the pouch doesn't tell you much.

Want to see what’s actually in your cat’s food? Scan the label with cat food scanner Leo to break down the nutrition and ingredients in seconds.