There is a piece of advice that circulates in every cat forum, and it is good advice. It goes like this: do not compare the protein on a can to the protein on a bag of kibble. The can is mostly water. Take the water out first, then compare.
The arithmetic is simple. A can declaring 11% protein and 78% moisture has 22% dry matter, and 11 divided by 22 is 50%. Fifty per cent protein on a dry matter basis, against maybe 40% for a good kibble. The wet food wins, and the person who did not do the division walks away thinking the can is weak.
So we did that calculation across the Singapore shelf. And it broke.
1. The number that cannot exist
We took the guaranteed analysis printed on twelve wet cat foods sold in Singapore — the figures on the retailer product pages, checked on 2 September 2026 — and converted each one to a dry matter basis. Here are the nine where both protein and moisture were published.
| Product | As printed on the label | Protein on a dry matter basis |
|---|---|---|
| Fancy Feast Classic Pâté, Tender Beef | min 11% / max 78% | 50.0% |
| Royal Canin Kitten Gravy pouch | 12% / 78% | 54.5% |
| Sheba Tuna & Salmon pouch | min 7% / max 88% | 58.3% |
| Kit Cat Complete Cuisine | min 10% / max 86% | 71.4% |
| Daily Delight Mousse with Tuna | min 8% / max 89% | 72.7% |
| Applaws Tuna Fillet in Broth | 16% / 80% | 80.0% |
| Monge Delicate Chicken | 18% / 79% | 85.7% |
| Aatas Cat Tuna & Crab in Aspic | min 10% / max 89% | 90.9% |
| Nurture Pro Longevity Chicken & Skipjack | min 18% / max 83% | 105.9% |
105.9%. A food cannot be more than one hundred per cent protein. There is no ingredient list, no processing method and no supplier on earth that produces that number.
This is not Nurture Pro lying to you. The figures on their label are almost certainly true. The calculation is what is wrong — and it is wrong for every row in that table, not just the last one. The last one is simply the row where the error grew large enough to become visible.
2. Why the calculation breaks
A guaranteed analysis is not a measurement. It is a set of promises.
"Crude protein minimum 18%" means the manufacturer undertakes that the food will not fall below 18%. It might be 18.2%. It might be 21%. The label does not say, and it is not supposed to.
"Moisture maximum 83%" means the food will not exceed 83% water. It might be 83%. It might be 76%.
Now look at what the dry matter calculation does with those two numbers. It divides the protein by one hundred minus the moisture. So it takes the lowest the protein might be — which understates the top of the fraction — and pairs it with the highest the water might be, which understates the bottom of the fraction far more sharply. Both errors push the answer in the same direction, and the one in the denominator is amplified because the denominator is small.
At 83% moisture the denominator is 17. If the food is really 76% water, the denominator is 24. That is a 41% difference in the divisor, produced entirely by a number the label was never claiming to measure.
This is the part worth carrying away: the higher the moisture, the more violently the calculation misbehaves. Which is precisely the opposite of what you want, because high-moisture food is exactly what you are trying to evaluate when you reach for this method in the first place.
3. Our own can is one of the offenders
We could stop there and let the table above do the work. We are not going to, because the same objection applies to us and it would be dishonest to let you think otherwise.
Here is the guaranteed analysis printed on our Chicken & Egg Yolk Lecithin Mousse can:
Crude Protein ≥10.0% · Crude Ash ≤3.0% · Crude Fat ≥0.5% · Crude Fiber ≤1.0% · Moisture ≤82.0%
Run the standard calculation on that label and you get 55.6% protein on a dry matter basis.
Now here is what an accredited laboratory actually measured in four intact cans of that product, in June 2026: crude protein 11.32%, moisture 76.5%. That is 48.2% on a dry matter basis.
Our own label, read the way the internet tells you to read it, flatters our own food by 7.4 percentage points. We printed that label. Nobody made us. And if you had used it to compare our can against someone else's, you would have been comparing two fictions.
The interesting thing is which direction the error runs. The real protein is higher than the minimum we promised, and the real moisture is lower than the maximum we promised — both of those are good news about the food. And the calculation still comes out wrong, because a calculation built on two guarantees cannot recover the measurement underneath them.
4. What you can read instead
The dry matter method is not broken. Its inputs are. Feed it measured values and it works exactly as advertised.
These are the measured values for our four cat flavours, from Centre Testing International (Qingdao), CNAS L4157, tested 2–8 June 2026:
| Flavour | Measured protein | Measured moisture | Protein, dry matter basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken, Goat Milk & Honey Mousse | 11.20% | 77.4% | 49.6% |
| Chicken & Egg Yolk Lecithin Mousse | 11.32% | 76.5% | 48.2% |
| Chicken & Salmon | 11.64% | 82.2% | 65.4% |
| Chicken & Tuna | 12.08% | 83.6% | 73.7% |
Report numbers and the laboratory's verification codes are on the numbers we publish, so you can check every one of these against the laboratory's own database rather than against our word.
And now the caveat we owe you on our own figures. Even measured values get fragile at high moisture. Take the Chicken & Tuna row: at 83.6% moisture, if the true moisture were one percentage point different, the dry matter protein would move by nearly five points. On our dog flavour at 85.9% moisture it would move by more than six. These are real measurements with real method precision behind them, but a number computed by dividing by a small denominator inherits all the uncertainty of that denominator and then multiplies it.
So read the 73.7% as "high, and higher than the flavours at lower moisture", not as a figure accurate to one decimal place. Anyone quoting a dry matter number to two decimals on a food that is four-fifths water is telling you they have not thought about it.
5. The second thing a can does not tell you
Protein is the number people argue about. Completeness is the one that actually matters, and it is far more likely to be missing.
A cat fed one food and nothing else needs that food to supply every nutrient she requires, in the right proportions. A food that does this is described in the American system as complete and balanced, and in the European system as a complete pet food. A food that does not is for intermittent or supplemental feeding only under AAFCO, or a complementary pet food under FEDIAF.
The distinction is not a technicality. A cat kept for months on complementary food alone can develop deficiencies that no amount of enthusiasm at the bowl will reveal until they are advanced.
Of the twelve Singapore wet cat foods we read:
- Four claim complete and balanced — Royal Canin, Fancy Feast, Kit Cat Complete Cuisine, Sheba.
- Three declare themselves complementary — Applaws, Monge, Almo Nature. All three are European brands, where that wording is required.
- Four say nothing at all — Aatas Cat (two products), Daily Delight and Nurture Pro. A twelfth, Absolute Holistic, we could not finish checking, so we are not counting it either way.
The silent group is as large as the group claiming completeness. Those packs carry a full guaranteed analysis, a feeding table, and no statement in either direction. They are not breaking any Singapore rule by doing so — as we set out in our article on comparing cat food here, AVS requires a guaranteed analysis and does not require an adequacy statement at all.
Only two of the twelve published an AAFCO adequacy statement, and both were established by formulation rather than by a feeding trial.
6. "Complies with pet food hygiene regulations" is not an adequacy claim
Printed on the back of our own can is this line:
This product complies with pet food hygiene regulations.
That sentence is accurate, and it is also easy to misread. It refers to the Pet Feed Hygiene Provisions issued under Announcement No. 20 of China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2018 — the same announcement our laboratory reports name in their conclusions.
Announcement No. 20 promulgated six documents. The one about hygiene sets limits on contaminants and pathogens, and applies to pet feed manufactured from 1 January 2019 onward. It sets no nutritional adequacy requirement whatsoever. Passing it means the food is not contaminated. It does not mean the food is a complete diet.
Completeness sits in a different document in the same announcement, which defines pet compound feed as feed that "can meet the pet's complete nutritional needs when used alone" — a manufacturing licence category, not a test result.
So when you see a can that says it complies with hygiene regulations, and a laboratory report that says it conforms to Announcement No. 20, you are looking at evidence about safety. You are not looking at evidence about nutrition. Those two things get blurred constantly, including by people who are not trying to blur them.
7. What our own cans do and do not say
Our can says Mousse Can for Cat. It carries no adequacy statement. That is honest, and it is what the food is.
Our website was not honest. Until 3 September 2026 this product was listed on kopipets.com.sg under the title "Can Complete Meal", and our dog can was listed as "Complete & Balanced Dog Can Food". Neither phrase appeared anywhere on the packaging. We put them in the website titles ourselves, we had nothing to support them, and we have removed them. The products are now listed as what they are.
We are writing that paragraph into a public article rather than quietly editing the titles because a correction nobody is told about is not really a correction.
There is one more inconsistency we have not resolved. The feeding table printed on our can gives a full daily ration by body weight — 85 to 170 grams a day for a cat of 1 to 3 kg, and so on up the scale. A full daily ration table is sole-diet guidance. Printing one on a can that carries no adequacy statement is a contradiction, it is on our packaging, and it is under review. We would rather name it here than wait until somebody else does.
8. Who makes it, and what "executive standard" means
Our cans are made by Shandong Zhongke Kangyuan Biotechnology Co., Ltd., Yishui County, Shandong, China. This is a different factory from the one that makes our dry cat food, which means the certifications we publish for that factory — FSSC 22000, HACCP, the feed production licences — do not cover these cans. We have asked this factory for its own documents and we will publish them when they arrive.
What these cans do hold is their own pre-import approval from Singapore's Animal & Veterinary Service, separate from the approval covering our dry food. That is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to inflate: an AVS approval is a documentary review of the product, the manufacturer and the country of origin. It is not a factory audit and it is not a test of the food. It does not substitute for the manufacturer's own certifications, which is why we are still asking for those.
The can also prints an executive standard: Q/371323SDZK601.
This is worth knowing how to read, because almost every product made in China prints one and almost nobody explains it. The prefix tells you what kind of standard it is. GB is a mandatory national standard. GB/T is a recommended national standard. NY/T is an agricultural industry standard. T/ is a group or association standard. And Q/ is an enterprise standard — one the manufacturer writes for itself and files with the local authority. The digits that follow encode the filing location: 371323 is the administrative code for Yishui County, which matches the factory address on the can.
Enterprise standards are lawful and extremely common, and they may not fall below mandatory national standards. But the difference matters: a GB number means the food was made to a rule somebody else set, and a Q/ number means it was made to a rule the factory set. Both can be perfectly good. Only one of them is independent.
Enterprise standards are filed on a public platform, so a Q/ code can be looked up rather than taken on faith.
9. So what should you actually do in front of the shelf?
Four things, in order of how much they tell you.
Look for an adequacy statement first, not a protein figure. "Complete and balanced", "complete pet food", or an explicit "complementary" or "for intermittent or supplemental feeding only". If a pack says none of these, treat it as complementary until the brand tells you otherwise. Ask them. How fast they answer is itself informative.
Then read the ingredient list, not the guaranteed analysis. The ingredient list is ordered by weight and cannot be a range. Ours reads: chicken breast, water, chicken liver, chicken heart, egg, chicken oil. Water at position two is normal for a mousse and is not a criticism of anyone; it is why the protein figure looks small.
Use the guaranteed analysis for what it is for — checking that a food clears a floor you care about, or stays under a ceiling. It answers "is there at least this much protein". It does not answer "how much protein is there", and no arithmetic performed on it will make it answer that.
Only convert to dry matter when you have measured values. Which, on the Singapore shelf, mostly means you cannot — because the values are almost never published.
What we have not done
Every article we write ends here, and this one has more entries than we would like.
- No adequacy statement for either canned range. We have asked. We do not have it. Until we do, we are not describing these cans as complete, and we have taken that word off our own listings.
- No manufacturer certifications on file for the can factory. We have full records for our dry food manufacturer and none at all for Shandong Zhongke Kangyuan. We have requested them.
- Taurine has never been measured in these cans. It is on the additives list. That tells you it was added; it does not tell you how much survived retorting. Taurine is the nutrient cats cannot make enough of themselves, so this is the gap we care about most.
- Heavy metals and aflatoxin were not tested on the canned range.
- The feeding table on our can implies sole-diet feeding while the can carries no adequacy statement. Unresolved, disclosed above.
- We did not finish the shelf survey. Twelve products, from two Singapore retailers' product pages, on one day. We had intended to check whether any wet food brand sold here publishes third-party laboratory results on its own website, and we did not complete that check — so we are not making any claim about it, in either direction. When we finish, we will say what we found.
The reason for publishing an unfinished survey and a contradiction on our own packaging is the same reason we publish the 48.2% instead of the 55.6%. A brand that only shows you the arithmetic that flatters it has told you something about its arithmetic, not about its food.
Sources
- Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People's Republic of China, Announcement No. 20 (2018), promulgating the Pet Feed Management Measures, Pet Feed Labelling Provisions and Pet Feed Hygiene Provisions
- Centre Testing International (Qingdao) Co., Ltd., test reports A2260445078101001E–006E, issued 9 June 2026, CNAS L4157
- Label figures transcribed from Kohepets and Pet Lovers Centre Singapore product pages, checked 2 September 2026
- Kopipets Chicken & Egg Yolk Lecithin Mousse Can for Cat, 85g, packaging transcribed directly
- AVS / NParks, Importing Pet Food and the associated labelling guideline
Label specifications change without notice, and the figures above were read on a single day. The can in your hand is the only one that counts.
Frequently asked questions
Why does wet cat food show such low protein compared to dry food? Because most of a can is water. A can at 11% protein and 77% moisture contains roughly 49% protein once the water is removed, which is higher than most dry foods. The comparison is only fair after the water is taken out — but it is only accurate if you use measured values rather than the minimums and maximums printed on the label.
How do I convert wet food protein to a dry matter basis? Divide the protein percentage by one hundred minus the moisture percentage, then multiply by one hundred. The method is sound; the inputs usually are not. A guaranteed analysis gives a minimum protein and a maximum moisture, and dividing one by the other pushes both errors the same way. Done on Singapore shelf labels, this method produces figures up to 105.9% protein, which is impossible.
What does "complementary pet food" mean on a cat food can? It means the food is not designed to be a cat's sole diet and does not supply complete nutrition on its own. The equivalent American wording is "for intermittent or supplemental feeding only". A pack that carries neither this wording nor a complete-and-balanced statement has told you nothing, and should be treated as complementary until the brand confirms otherwise.
Does "complies with pet food hygiene regulations" mean the food is nutritionally complete? No. That phrase refers to contaminant and pathogen limits — in the Chinese system, the Pet Feed Hygiene Provisions under Announcement No. 20 of 2018. It is a safety statement. Nutritional completeness is a separate matter governed by a different document and is not established by any hygiene test.
What does a Q/ executive standard number mean on a Chinese-made product? Q/ denotes an enterprise standard, written and filed by the manufacturer itself, as distinct from a national standard (GB, GB/T), an industry standard (NY/T) or a group standard (T/). Enterprise standards are lawful and may not fall below mandatory national standards, but they are set by the producer rather than by an independent body. The digits following Q/ encode the filing locality.
Is Kopipets canned food complete and balanced? We are not claiming that it is. Our cans carry no nutritional adequacy statement, and we have asked our manufacturer for one. Our website previously used the words "Complete Meal" and "Complete & Balanced" in the product titles; neither phrase appeared on the packaging, we could not support them, and we removed them on 3 September 2026.
