Every vet, every nutrition body and every article on the subject says the same thing: treats should be under ten per cent of a cat's daily calories. The World Small Animal Veterinary Association puts it plainly — "Treats should always make up less than 10% of a cat's daily calorie intake."
It is good advice. It is also close to impossible to follow, and the reason is not the cat.
To apply a ten per cent rule you need two numbers: how many calories your cat needs, and how many calories are in the treat. The first you can estimate or ask your vet. The second is not printed on most treat packs sold in Singapore, including ours.
WSAVA's own guidance quietly concedes the problem. Its instruction for commercial treats is to "contact the manufacturer for calorie information if not stated on the label." That is a nutrition body telling you to email a company because the pack does not say.
So this article does two things. It works out the calorie content of our own lickable treats and publishes it. And it shows you the arithmetic, so you can do the same to any treat you own.
We will also tell you what we found when we ran it on ourselves, which is that the upper end of the feeding guidance printed on our own pack exceeds the ten per cent rule for a typical cat.
1. What ten per cent actually is, in calories
WSAVA gives a worked example: a 3.5 kg cat has a treat allowance of about 21 kcal a day. That is the whole budget. Not per treat — per day.
Twenty-one calories is a very small amount of food. WSAVA's own comparison table makes the point brutally: an ounce of plain cooked chicken breast is 47 kcal, which is more than double a 3.5 kg cat's entire daily treat allowance.
Cats are small. This is the thing that gets lost. A treat that would be a rounding error in a human diet is a meaningful fraction of a cat's.
2. Almost nobody prints the number
There is one notable exception on the lickable-treat shelf, and credit where it is due: Inaba publishes calories for Churu — 430 kcal/kg, and 6.0 kcal per 0.5 oz tube. It also states on the pack that the product "is not intended to be fed as a meal."
Both of those are the right thing to do, and we do neither. Our pack prints a guaranteed analysis, an ingredient list and a feeding suggestion, and no calorie figure anywhere. We are fixing that on the next print run. In the meantime, here is the number.
3. Working out the calories in a lickable treat
When a pet food has no measured energy value, the standard method is the modified Atwater calculation, which estimates metabolisable energy from the proximate analysis using 3.5 kcal per gram of protein, 8.5 per gram of fat, and 3.5 per gram of carbohydrate.
Carbohydrate is not usually declared. You get it by subtraction: one hundred, minus protein, fat, ash, fibre and moisture. Whatever is left is nitrogen-free extract, which is the carbohydrate fraction.
Here is that calculation on our three flavours. Critically, these are measured laboratory values, not the minimums and maximums on the label — for the reason we set out in our article on reading a can label, arithmetic done on a guaranteed analysis produces fiction. The figures below come from Centre Testing International (Qingdao), CNAS L4157.
| Flavour | Protein | Fat | Ash | Moisture | Carbohydrate (by difference) |
Energy | Per 15 g stick |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tuna & Shrimp | 8.57% | 2.5% | 1.1% | 81.3% | 6.0% | 724 kcal/kg | 10.9 kcal |
| Salmon & Fish Oil | 8.60% | 2.5% | 1.0% | 81.6% | 5.8% | 717 kcal/kg | 10.8 kcal |
| Chicken & Goat Milk | 8.58% | 2.4% | 1.0% | 81.8% | 5.7% | 704 kcal/kg | 10.6 kcal |
Roughly 10.7 kcal a stick.
Two honest caveats on that figure. Crude fibre came back below the reporting limit on all three flavours, so we have used 0.5% as a working assumption; it moves the answer by a fraction of a calorie. And modified Atwater is an estimate — the accurate way to establish metabolisable energy is a feeding study, which has not been done on these treats. The number is a good working figure, not a measurement.
4. What that means at the bowl
WSAVA's 3.5 kg cat gets 21 kcal of treats a day.
Our sticks are 10.7 kcal each.
That is two sticks. Two sticks is the entire daily treat allowance for a 3.5 kg cat — not two sticks plus something else.
Now here is the part we would rather not write. The feeding suggestion printed on our own pack says "1–3 sticks daily." Three sticks is 32 kcal, which is about 15% of that cat's daily calories — half again over the ten per cent guideline.
The guidance is not absurd; a larger cat with a higher energy requirement can take three. But the pack does not say that, and the upper end of a range printed without qualification is the number people use. We are revising it, and we are telling you now rather than waiting for the reprint.
5. Why ours carry more calories than a Churu
Churu is 430 kcal/kg. Ours are around 715. Ours are roughly 1.7 times as energy-dense, weight for weight.
That is not a defect and it is not a boast. It is water. Churu's label allows up to 91% moisture; our treats measured 81.3 to 81.8%. Less water means more of everything else in the same gram — more protein, more fat, more calories.
What follows from that is simple and worth saying clearly: a denser treat is not a better treat, it is a treat you give fewer of. If you have been giving three of something at 6 kcal and you switch to something at 10.7 kcal, you have nearly doubled the treat load without changing the number of treats. Nothing on either pack would tell you that.
6. What a lickable treat is not
It is not a meal, and it is not designed to be a complete diet.
Our treats carry no nutritional adequacy statement, and we are not claiming one. Neither, for that matter, does Churu, which states outright that it is not intended to be fed as a meal. That is the correct position for the category — these are high-moisture, palatable, single-purpose products, and none of them is formulated to supply everything a cat needs.
The risk with lickable treats specifically is that they are so well accepted that they get used as a meal substitute for a cat who is off her food. That is exactly the situation where a cat most needs complete nutrition, and it is the situation where a treat is least able to provide it. If your cat is not eating, that is a conversation with a vet, not a reason to reach for more sticks.
7. What we know and do not know about our own treats
We publish the third-party test results for these treats, and we publish their limitations in the same breath, because the second half is what makes the first half worth reading.
The reports are from September 2025. Samples of twenty intact 15 g sticks per flavour were received on 1 September 2025 and the reports were issued on 8 September 2025. They describe what was tested then. If your pack came from a later run, they do not cover it. Fresh testing is being arranged.
Five items only. Crude protein, crude fat, crude ash, crude fibre and moisture. Melamine and salmonella were not tested on the treats. Our canned range was tested for both; this range was not, and we are not going to let one range borrow the other's results. Heavy metals and aflatoxin were not tested either.
Taurine was never measured — including on the Tuna & Shrimp flavour, where our own product description mentions it. Taurine occurs naturally in fish and shellfish, and Inaba adds and declares it on Churu. We have not put a number on ours, so read our mention of it as a statement about ingredients rather than a measured value.
And the protein margin is thin. Our label promises at least 8.0%. The measured values were 8.57%, 8.58% and 8.60%. The food meets its claim on all three flavours, but by about half a percentage point, which is not much room for batch-to-batch variation. We would rather point that out ourselves than have somebody find it.
Report numbers and the laboratory's verification codes are on the numbers we publish, so you can check every one of these at the laboratory's own website instead of taking our word for it.
8. How to do this for any treat in your cupboard
Four steps, and you only need the back of the pack.
Look for a calorie figure first — usually written as kcal/kg or kcal per piece. If it is there, you are done; skip to the last step. If it is not, email the manufacturer, which is what WSAVA tells you to do, and note how long they take to reply.
If you have to calculate it, take the guaranteed analysis and subtract protein, fat, ash, fibre and moisture from one hundred. That remainder is the carbohydrate.
Multiply: protein × 3.5, fat × 8.5, carbohydrate × 3.5. Add them. That is kcal per 100 g. Multiply by the weight of one piece in grams, divide by 100, and you have the calories in one treat.
Then divide your cat's treat allowance by that. Roughly ten per cent of daily calories — about 21 kcal for a 3.5 kg cat on WSAVA's own example — is the budget.
One warning, and it is the same one as last time. A guaranteed analysis is a set of minimums and maximums, not measurements, so a calorie figure derived from it is an approximation with the errors stacked in one direction. It is enough to tell you whether you are giving two treats or six. It is not enough to argue about decimal places.
What we have not done
- We do not print calories on the pack. Inaba does. We should, and the next print run will.
- Our feeding suggestion needs revising. Three sticks a day exceeds the ten per cent guideline for a 3.5 kg cat, and the pack does not qualify the range by body weight.
- The calorie figure above is calculated, not measured. No feeding study has been done to establish metabolisable energy for these treats.
- Taurine has never been measured in any Kopipets product, treats included, despite appearing in our own marketing copy for one flavour.
- The test reports are a year old and cover five items. No melamine, no salmonella, no heavy metals, no aflatoxin.
- We did not survey the wider Singapore treat shelf for this article. The only competitor figures here are Inaba's, taken from their own published data, because they were the ones we could verify. A proper comparison across the category is work we have not done.
The reason for publishing our own pack's overshoot in the same article that publishes our own calorie figure is that a brand which only tells you the flattering half of an arithmetic problem has told you about its arithmetic, not about its food.
Sources
- WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee, Feeding treats to your cat
- Inaba Foods, Churu Chicken Recipe product page — published guaranteed analysis and calorie content
- Centre Testing International (Qingdao) Co., Ltd., test reports A2250640260101001E–003E, issued 8 September 2025, CNAS L4157
- Kopipets Creamy Cat Treats, 15 g stick, packaging transcribed directly
- Modified Atwater factors as used for pet food energy estimation: 3.5 kcal/g protein, 8.5 kcal/g fat, 3.5 kcal/g nitrogen-free extract
Figures were checked on 3 September 2026. Formulations and labels change; the pack in your hand is the one that counts.
Frequently asked questions
How many lickable treats can a cat have per day? It depends on the calories in the treat, which is why the answer is never a fixed number of tubes. WSAVA advises keeping treats under 10% of daily calories and gives about 21 kcal a day as the allowance for a 3.5 kg cat. A Churu tube at 6 kcal means roughly three; a 15 g Kopipets stick at about 10.7 kcal means roughly two. Check the calorie figure for the treat you actually own.
How do I work out the calories in a cat treat if the pack does not say? Subtract protein, fat, ash, fibre and moisture from one hundred to get the carbohydrate share. Then multiply protein by 3.5, fat by 8.5 and carbohydrate by 3.5, and add them for kcal per 100 g. Scale that to the weight of one treat. This is the modified Atwater estimate and it is an approximation, not a measurement — and because a guaranteed analysis gives minimums and maximums rather than measured values, the result carries the errors of those ranges.
Are lickable cat treats a complete food? No. Lickable purée and mousse treats are high-moisture supplemental products and are not formulated to supply complete nutrition. Inaba states that Churu is not intended to be fed as a meal; Kopipets treats carry no nutritional adequacy statement either. They should never replace a meal, and a cat who has stopped eating needs a vet rather than more treats.
Why do some lickable treats have far more calories than others? Mostly water content. A treat allowing up to 91% moisture carries less of everything else per gram than one measuring around 81%. Kopipets treats calculate to roughly 715 kcal/kg against Churu's published 430 kcal/kg — about 1.7 times as energy-dense — which means fewer of them fit inside the same daily treat allowance.
Do Kopipets cat treats contain measured taurine? No. Taurine has never been measured in any Kopipets product. It occurs naturally in the fish and shellfish used in the Tuna & Shrimp flavour, and our description has mentioned it, but no laboratory has put a figure on it. Treat that mention as a statement about ingredients rather than a measured value.
