How TabbyTable works
This is a data site, not a review site. It does not score foods, rank them against each other, or tell you what to buy. It takes figures printed on packages, converts them onto a common basis, and shows the arithmetic.
Who runs this
I'm Weddy Yu, and I live with a cat called Jiaojiao - pronounced roughly jyow-jyow. My mother brought him home from a friend during my first year of high school. He is a blue-and-tabby mixed breed, four years old now, and male, which is a fact that surprises people who hear the name first.
The name comes from a novel I was obsessed with back then. In it, the heroine takes in what she assumes is an ordinary cat and names him something soft and affectionate. Only much later does she find out he is the male lead, and not a cat at all. I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever read, so when a real kitten showed up, the name was already decided.
Why I started reading labels
It did not start with cat food. My mother has kidney problems, and for a long stretch she could not eat anything with added salt. Watching that change what a household cooks and buys makes you pay attention. She began teaching herself nutrition, properly - not from headlines, from composition and balance - and then, as mothers do, she started telling me about it every single day.
It rubbed off. I got into the habit of turning things over and reading the panel before buying, first with my own snacks, and then, inevitably, with the bag I was pouring into the bowl.
The part that actually pushed me over the edge was Jiaojiao throwing his food back up. If you have watched a cat do that and then gone straight to the cupboard to squint at an ingredient list, you already understand why this site exists. I wanted to know what was in there, and I wanted to compare two bags without the fact that one of them was 80% water quietly deciding the answer for me.
What that means for how this site is built
I am not a veterinarian and I am not a veterinary nutritionist. Nothing here is a diagnosis, and nothing here should replace a conversation with your own vet - especially if your cat is vomiting, losing weight, or otherwise unwell. What I can do is read a label carefully, transcribe it honestly, do the arithmetic in public, and show you exactly where every number came from and when it was last checked.
Almost every cat food site is written around pedigree cats. In the United States, fewer than one cat in fifty is a pedigree; most are domestic shorthairs, and a brown tabby is the most ordinary cat there is. Jiaojiao is one of those. This site is written for him, and for the cat most people actually live with.
The Jiaojiao files
What is published, and what is not
TabbyTable currently holds 45 products and 26 ingredient reference entries, of which 19 products have passed verification against the manufacturer's published label.
Records that have not been verified carry a visible sample banner on the page and are held out of robots and the sitemap. They are placeholders used to build the site, and they do not get sent to search engines in that state.
Three rules this site keeps
1. Estimates are labelled as estimates
Carbohydrate is not required on United States cat food labels, and almost no manufacturer prints it. It can only be derived by subtracting everything else from one hundred percent, which needs an ash figure that is also usually missing. Where ash is absent TabbyTable assumes a typical value and says so in plain language at the point the number appears, every time.
2. No health verdicts
The ingredient reference describes what each ingredient is and how it is discussed. It never states or implies that something is toxic, harmful, or causes disease. That line is what separates a reference work from medical advice, and staying on the correct side of it is also what keeps the site out of Google's harmful-content territory.
3. Nothing is ranked for money
No brand has ever paid for a position here, and none will. Every value shown comes from a label with a link back to its source. This is also, pragmatically, the only defensible position in a niche where trust is the whole product.
Licence and reuse
Figures published here are transcriptions of factual label data, which is not copyrightable as fact; the analyses, conversions and written explanations carry an attribution licence. If you want to reuse the dataset, contact us - it will normally be fine as long as the sources and the “not verified" status travel with it.
Corrections
Formulas change without announcement, and this dataset will be wrong sometimes. If a figure here disagrees with the package in front of you, the package is right and this site is wrong. Send the discrepancy and it will be corrected and re-dated. Every page carries a last-checked date precisely so that staleness is visible rather than hidden.
How this site pays for itself
TabbyTable may earn commission from retailers if you buy through links on this site. Those links never influence figures, conversions, or ordering, and no retailer has input into what gets written. Nothing on the site is priced higher for you because of it.