When choosing a high-quality, hydrating meal for your cat, most pet parents focus on important details like texture, smell, and ingredients. Some even take the extra step of asking how much skin or bone is included in the recipe. These are all smart ways to evaluate quality.
But there’s another detail that often gets overlooked: the color.
This simple visual cue can tell you more than you might think about what’s in your pet's bowl.
One Color Fits All?
Take a look at most patés and you’ll notice something strange: nearly all of them are the same color. Whether the label says chicken, salmon, tuna, or beef, the food inside often appears as a uniform brown mush.
Now picture those same proteins prepared on your kitchen counter. Would they all look alike? Not even close. So why do they look the same in pet food?
It comes down to how most patés are made. Many companies blend meat, skin, and bone, then process everything together using high heat or enzymatic treatments. This heavy processing breaks it all down into a smooth, uniform texture and turns just about everything brown. The result may be efficient, but it also makes it hard to tell what kind of ingredients are actually in the bowl.
What Smooth Texture Can Hide
Patés are popular for their soft, scoopable consistency. But meat doesn’t naturally come that way, not even when cooked.
To make meat smooth, it must be thoroughly blended. And once it is, less desirable ingredients like skin, bone, and lower-grade cuts can easily be hidden in the mix.
Many pet food brands rely on these parts to create their patés. The final product is heavily processed, visually indistinct, and often brown across the board regardless of the protein listed on the label.
A Simple At-Home Test
Curious how your cat’s food compares? Choose four or five patés from different brands, each labeled with a different protein. Open them side by side. Do they look nearly identical?
Now think about how steak, chicken, salmon, and tuna look when you prepare them in your own kitchen. Each has its own color and texture.
Next, compare those with Weruva’s patés.
Every Weruva recipe has a look that matches the protein inside. White breast meat chicken is pale and light. Salmon is naturally pinkish-orange. Dark meat chicken, tuna, and beef each show their own distinct shades. These visible differences are no coincidence. They reflect the ingredients and the care that go into every can and pouch.
Why Weruva Patés Look (and Are) Different
Weruva patés start with the same high quality cuts used in our popular shreds in gravy recipes.
To create a smooth texture, we gently purée the meat using a simple immersion blender. It’s a physical process, similar to how someone might make soup or baby food at home. There are:
- No enzymes
- No high heat
- No chemical treatments
Because the meats are boneless and skinless, there’s more room for moisture, something cats need to stay hydrated and healthy. And because the process is so gentle, the natural qualities of the protein remain intact, including the color.
Color as a Sign of Transparency and Quality
Chicken breast and beef aren’t the same protein. They shouldn’t look the same when blended into a paté. When each recipe has its own distinct look, it means the ingredients haven’t been altered or disguised.
The color of our patés reflects the real, recognizable meats used to make them. We don’t mask the differences. We highlight them.
The Takeaway
The color of your cat’s paté may seem like a small detail, but it can reveal a lot. It’s one of the clearest signs of how the food was made, what’s in it, and how much the brand values transparency. Weruva patés deliver:
- Real meat you can trust
- Gentle processing that preserves natural color and texture
- A hydrating, smooth texture that supports urinary health
- A rainbow of protein-based colors, not a uniform shade of brown
They’re going to love this stuff. Curious to try a few different patés? Explore our full paté lineup to find the right flavors for your feline.
