Why freeze-dried works as a meal topper

A meal topper has one job: get the bowl eaten. Not eaten ecstatically - just eaten, by an animal who has decided that today, their food is beneath them.

That is a narrower job than the category usually claims, and it is worth being straight about up front. A topper will not fix a diet that is wrong for your pet, it is not a meal, and it is not a treatment for anything. What it can do is make an ordinary bowl of food more interesting than it was thirty seconds ago.

Smell does most of the work

A 2025 review of pet food palatability in the journal Foods puts it plainly: aroma is often the primary driver of initial interest, because dogs and cats assess food by smell long before they taste it. The same review points to specific volatile compounds - heptanal, nonanal and octanal among them - that track with how much of a food actually gets eaten.

That is where the drying method starts to matter. Freeze-drying takes the water out at low temperature by sublimation, rather than cooking it off with heat.

We are not going to put a number on aroma retention, because we have not seen a study that measured it on this product, and a made-up percentage is worth nothing to you. What we can tell you is what the process is, and what happens when you open the bag: you can smell it across the kitchen, and your dog can smell it from the other end of the house.

Cats and dogs are not the same problem

Cats have no functional sweet taste receptor. They respond strongly instead to amino acids and nucleotides - the savoury, umami end of taste - and the research consistently describes them as the fussier and more strictly carnivorous of the two species. Dogs are far more flexible eaters.

The practical version: for a cat, plain meat is close to the thing they are actually built to want, which is why it tends to work when other additions do not. For a dog, a topper is often doing its work through novelty as much as flavour - which is also why the same topper every night gradually stops impressing them.

The water question, especially for cats

This one is worth knowing if you have a cat on dry food. A 2026 scoping review in the Journal of Animal Science by Kosmal and colleagues went through 32 publications on feline water intake. Cats fed wet diets took in roughly 42 to 51 mL of water per kg of body weight a day and produced more dilute urine. Cats on dry diets took in less water overall and produced more concentrated urine - and the review found they did not fully make up the shortfall by drinking more.

Now the honest caveat, because this is exactly the kind of finding a pet brand would happily oversell. Rehydrating a small amount of freeze-dried meat adds a small amount of water to one meal. That is all. It is not a substitute for a wet diet, a water fountain, or a proper conversation with your vet if your cat has any urinary history. But if you are adding a topper anyway, adding it wet instead of dry costs you nothing and gives you a little back.

How much, and where the line is

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association puts treats at no more than 10% of daily calories, and a topper counts against that budget. Their reference table runs from about 14 calories a day for a 2 kg dog to about 146 calories for a 45 kg dog. It is not a large allowance.

The reason for the limit is not rule-keeping for its own sake. A complete and balanced food is balanced at the quantity your pet is meant to eat. Pile enough single-ingredient meat on top and you dilute the vitamins and minerals in the food underneath. At that point you have not improved the meal - you have made it less complete than it was.

One thing a topper should never be used for

If a pet who has always eaten well suddenly goes off their food, that is not a palatability problem and a topper is the wrong answer. Dental pain, nausea, kidney disease and a long list of other conditions show up first as an animal losing interest in dinner. A tasty topper can paper over that for a week or two, which is precisely the wrong outcome.

Get them checked first. Then, if everything is fine and they are simply being particular, worry about making dinner more appealing.

How to actually use it

• Crumble it, do not perch it. A whole cube sitting on top gets picked off and the rest of the bowl gets ignored. Broken up and stirred through, the smell goes everywhere and the food underneath comes with it.
• Add a splash of warm water. It rehydrates the meat, lifts the aroma, and puts a little moisture into the meal.
• Rotate. Novelty is doing some of the work, so it fades if you use the same thing every single night.
• Start small and stay there. Use the least that works. If you escalate every time they hesitate, you teach a perfectly healthy animal to hold out for a better offer.

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KYNTAY freeze-dried chicken cubes are a single ingredient - chicken breast, nothing added. They work as a training treat and as a meal topper. They are not a complete and balanced diet, and they are not intended to treat any condition.

Sources

• Modern Palatant Strategies in Dry and Wet Pet Food: Formulation Technologies, Patent Innovations, and Market Evolution (2025). Foods, 14(16), 2824.
• Kosmal et al. (2026). Diet format, protein, amino acids, salt, and osmolytes, as well as water viscosity, affect water consumption in domestic cats: a scoping review of 32 publications. Journal of Animal Science, 104.
• World Small Animal Veterinary Association. Feeding treats to your dog.