Contaminants in Cat Food

What it shows

The Clean Label Project tested 100 cat foods from 62 brands for more than 122 substances and published summary figures in its 2026 Cat Food Category Report. This page draws those figures: how often each substance was found, how much more of some substances turned up in certain kinds of food, and how products did against the organization's own standard.

Reading it

Each row has 100 dots, one for each product. A filled dot is a product where the substance was found, a pale dot with an outline means trace levels only, and an open ring means it was not found. Rows are counts and not lists, because the report does not say which products. The comparisons in the second part share one logarithmic scale, with an open dot at 1× for the group being compared with, so equal distances mean equal ratios. You can hover or tab to any row to see its figure and where it was confirmed, and a table of all 31 figures is at the bottom.

What stands out

• Lead was found in 99 of the 100 products, cadmium in 96 and arsenic in 94.
• Fish-based wet foods carried about 28 times the mercury of wet foods made with other proteins. Across all formats, fish and seafood foods carried about 18 times the mercury of foods made with other proteins.
• Dry foods had roughly 3 times the lead of wet and air-dried foods, and canned and pouched foods had about 5 times the DEHP of bagged foods.
• 84.8% of poultry products met the Clean Label Project's standard, against 25.7% of fish and seafood products, a gap of 59.1 percentage points.
• Glyphosate was found in 37 products. The report links each added plant ingredient among the first ten listed with about 40% more glyphosate, and that figure is an association, not a ratio between two groups.

Where the data comes from

Every figure is a summary figure from the Clean Label Project's 2026 Cat Food Category Report, and I checked each against its study page, its press release and coverage from CNN, Scripps News and Newsweek where they repeat it. The Clean Label Project has not released results for individual products, so there is no product-level data. The 100 products were bought at retail and each was tested from a single batch: 31 dry, 40 wet and 29 air-dried or freeze-dried. The 28× mercury multiple for fish-based wet foods is on the study page and in the press release, and the report prints it only as a chart label. The repository has every figure in a CSV file, with the places that confirm it.

What to keep in mind

• The standard is the Clean Label Project's own and measures each product against the other products in the study. The report says no regulatory limits apply, so it is not a safety limit.
• The figures are detection rates and multiples, not amounts, so a large multiple of a small amount looks the same as a small multiple of a large amount.
• The report does not say how many products had several substances at once, or how large the groups behind the multiples and shares are.
• This is an independent project that uses published figures only.