History of Raw Feeding Cats: The Original Recipe, Feline Future, and the Cat Food Premix

PART ONE – The Vancouver Years (1994–1998) is the first chapter of an illustrated historical archive documenting the evolution of homemade raw feeding for cats, the original Feline Future recipe, the development of the cat food premix, and the cats who helped shape nearly three decades of continuous feeding trials.

The companion audio overview below is intended to be enjoyed alongside the historical archive that follows. As the story unfolds, readers are invited to scroll through the original photographs, recipes, printed materials, and first-hand recollections preserved and curated by founder Natascha Wille to bring the narrative to life.

In 1994, two university students were living in a basement suite in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood, close to the University of British Columbia. There was very little money, no car, and no particular plans to become involved in feline nutrition.

Their names were Scott Baker and Natascha Wille.

Then, a few days before Christmas, during an evening walk through the snow, a little cat became determined to follow them home. No hand-clapping or shooing could convince her otherwise. She slipped through the door of the modest basement suite and slept under the covers with them that very first night. Attempts to locate a possible owner during the following weeks failed.

And so it was that they were adopted by their very first cat.

Freya, as the cat came to be known, seemed completely unbothered by the fact that they had never met before and behaved as though she had finally returned home after a long journey. She quickly became a bright spot in an otherwise uncertain chapter of life.

Not long after Freya’s arrival, Scott and Natascha were faced with the modern issues of cat ownership: obesity and urinary tract infection. So began a journey of learning about cats. Neither could have imagined where that search would lead.

What began as an attempt to help one beloved cat by changing her diet to something homemade would eventually grow into something far larger than anyone could have anticipated.

A second cat followed Freya’s footsteps in much the same way she had some months after. The outgoing, adolescent orange boy would become known as Olaf. Like Freya, he quickly found his place in the small household and further deepened Scott and Natascha’s growing fascination with cats.

Having only recently landed as immigrant in Canada, Natascha’s days were often spent alone. Scott’s family suggested volunteering for the BCSPCA as an outlet for Natascha’s love for animals, as well as immersion into the community.

Natascha’s volunteer work as an adoption counsellor with the Vancouver branch of the BC SPCA that followed, as well as the presence of their own two cats and desire to better understand their needs, inspired the creation of the Feline Future Foundation in 1995. The small grass-roots educational organization was brought to life in Scott and Natascha’s basement suite in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood.

The organization originally focused on broader feline welfare and education issues, including understanding feline behaviour, improving the human-cat relationship, and advocating for higher standards of care.

At the time, stray and unclaimed cats often faced euthanasia after only a short holding period if homes could not be found. As adoption counsellors, Natascha was confronted regularly with cats that were healthy, affectionate, and full of personality, yet whose futures were very uncertain. The experience left a profound impression.

The choice of the name Feline Future reflected the founders witnessing cats who effectively had no future unless somebody intervened.The organization’s name reads as a direct response to that. A hope to help create a better future for cats.

The mission of Feline Future in 1995 was broader than nutrition alone. The foundation sought to improve the relationship between cats and the people who cared for them through education, advocacy, and practical support. Its founders encouraged cat owners to better understand feline behaviour, environmental needs, and natural instincts, believing that many problems arose not from difficult cats, but from a lack of understanding of the species itself. At its heart, Feline Future was an effort to help people help cats, expressed in one of the earliest educational brochures that invited readers to “Understand Our Feline Friends” .

This emphasis on understanding the true nature of the cat would later become the philosophical foundation for Feline Future’s nutritional work.

At the time, companion cats were commonly fed exclusively dry kibble diets. Obesity, urinary tract disease, and other chronic health problems were becoming increasingly common among indoor cats. The search for better answers naturally led toward nutrition.

By the end of 1995, Natascha and Scott had adopted their third cat: Mischief the office cat at the Vancouver Branch of the BCSPC, who had spent too much time left alone.

Feline Future Cat Food Recipe Evolution:

In 1995, the first three cats were fed fresh meat daily fortified with supplements added to each servings. Bone meal, brewer’s yeast, and kelp were among those, in addition to some vegetable oil for vitamin E and some cooked vegetables in the form of baby food in jars. Raw liver was fed once weekly, and an egg yolk was added to a meal a couple of times a week.

Knowledge was drawn from several sources: Natascha’s German background provided access to German books about cat care that offered practical advice on how to feed cats with common household ingredients, which was common there. Scientific literature describing the diet and prey selection of wild cats provided the biological foundation, while books by authors such as Anitra Frazier and Dr Richard Pitcairn offered some guidance for use on supplements.

Feeding of day-old chicks and chicken necks was also common practise in Germany. However, day-old chicks were not readily available in Vancouver pet stores, which is why Scott and Natascha’s cats were given frozen feeder mice instead.

In 1996, Feline Future was still a small educational organization run from the Kitsilano basement suite by two 23-year-olds with little money, no real business experience, and no expectation that their ideas would reach beyond their local community.

What they did possess was an unusual combination of skills and interests. Natascha brought a background in graphic design and photography. Scott, an Electrical Engineering student with a fascination for computers and emerging technologies, approached problems through observation, record keeping, graphing, and the scientific method.

As Feline Future grew, so did a parallel venture called Paw Print Graphics. Combining Natascha Wille’s formal training in illustration and graphic design with Scott Baker’s interest in emerging digital publishing technologies, the small business provided both income and invaluable professional skills. Through freelance design projects, illustration work, printing contacts, and early web development, Paw Print Graphics gave Feline Future Foundation direct access to the tools needed to communicate its message.

This connection proved transformative. Brochures, newsletters, logos, educational displays, and eventually a web page could be designed and produced in-house. Relationships formed through the printing and publishing industry opened doors to resources and opportunities that many small organisations struggled to access. Rather than outsourcing the communication of its ideas, Feline Future was able to build its identity, educational materials, and online presence from within.

Looking back, Paw Print Graphics and Feline Future developed side by side. One provided the mission; the other provided the means to share it.

Feline Future Cat Food Recipe Evolution

In 1996, Feline Future’s attention was increasingly turning toward nutrition, and months of homemade cat food experimentation with their three cats were brought into clear focus in a first recipe.

The first recipe was based on ground/minced meat with cooked & pureed vegetables, and was supplemented with vegetable oil, bone meal, sea weed blend, digestive enzymes and spring water for desired consistency.

Liver and egg yolk were still fed as separate meals either weekly or bi-weekly, and the recipe suggested addition of a “nut and seed blend” – consisting of finely ground sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeks, hazelnuts, and walnuts – as source for essential nutrients supplied by the prey stomach. The idea that cats eat their prey’s stomach as source of nutrients was later proven wrong during observations.

Many of the core ideas that would later define Feline Future were already present. The recipe drew inspiration from the biology of wild cats, prey-model thinking, and recognized the domestic cat as an obligate carnivore. Raw meat formed the foundation of the diet. Starches such as rice, potatoes, and oatmeal were omitted entirely—an unusual and controversial approach at the time.

The first recipe circulated as a simple handout—little more than a single sheet of paper passed from one cat owner to another. Few could have imagined that this modest document would become the starting point for a nutritional philosophy, a premix, and a movement that would eventually reach cat owners around the world.

As interest in the recipe grew, Scott began experimenting with one of the newest communication tools available: the World Wide Web. Most households had never visited a website. Search engines were primitive, Google did not yet exist, social media did not yet exist, but publishing information to a worldwide audience was no longer limited to publishers, magazines, or large organizations.

Scott’s connection to his former school St. Michaels University School and lasting friendship with one of his former teachers provided the opportunity for Feline Future’s first online presence. Before Feline Future had its own domain, its earliest web page was hosted within SMUS web space at www.smus.bc.ca/doe/fff – reflecting the collaborative and experimental nature of the early internet.

The earliest online presence of Feline Future was modest by modern standards, little more than a simple web page sharing information about cats and nutrition. Whether the recipe created the need for a web page, or the web page gave the recipe a wider audience, is difficult to say today. Both grew together during the internet’s formative years.

Looking back, the timing seems almost impossibly fortunate. A small educational project found itself at the right place and the right time. What had begun as a local effort to better understand cats was gradually becoming part of a growing international conversation.

In March that year, Natascha discontinued volunteering as an adoption councillor at the Vancouver Branch of the BCSPCA – adopting a young tabby from the adoption room on her last day there. Cheops became the 4th Feline Future cat, and the cats began to dominate everyday life.

Graduation from the University of British Columbia brought significant changes for both Feline Future and its founders. In September 1996, Scott and Natascha relocated from their Kitsilano basement suite to a larger home in Burnaby on the eastern edge of Metro Vancouver, providing more space for both their growing organization and their expanding family of cats.

Only days before the move, a lost, young female cat whose owner could not be found crossed their path. Not wanting to leave the pretty little calico to an uncertain fate, Katja made the move to Burnaby with them and became the 6th cat of Feline Future. Later, she would become one of the more important and memorable members of the Study Group that was beginning to take shape.

Other things were growing as well.

The organization’s online presence expanded into a full website under the domain name felinefuture.com. The original Recipe for a Nutriment for Cats evolved into a 22-page booklet titled How to Feed a Carnivore, bringing together Feline Future’s developing ideas about feline nutrition. Looking back, the booklet clearly foreshadowed a future book. One chapter heading would later evolve into a phrase that became closely associated with Feline Future’s philosophy: Taking Cats Back to Their Roots.

Feline Future Cat Food Recipe Evolution: The 1997 “Recipe for a Nutriment for Cats”

Further refinement of the recipe occurred. The recipe now contained several features that would remain consistent throughout the evolution of the Feline Future feeding program, including a distinctive ratio of 700 g skeletal muscle meat, 200 g heart, 100 g liver, and two egg yolks. This proportion became a defining characteristic of Feline Future’s recipes and remains recognizable in the company’s formulations today. As homemade raw feeding grew in popularity, the same ratio began appearing in numerous recipes and commercial products, becoming one of the enduring fingerprints of Feline Future’s early influence on feline nutrition.

The recipe was strongly moving towards the idea of re-constructing prey with the inclusion of organ meats and glandular supplement. Vegetable oil was replaced by a Vitamin E supplement, and Salmon oil provided essential fatty acids. The addition of apple cider vinegar was rooted in our brief exploration into folk medicine and thought to aid digestion.

The move to Burnaby also marked the beginning of a much larger observational project.

Committed to improving the lives of cats wherever they found them, Scott and Natascha became involved with a neglected mother cat and her three kittens living outdoors across the road from their new home. The little cat family soon joined the growing Feline Future household, bringing the study group up to 10 cats.

As the number of cats increased, so did the founders’ ambitions. They wanted to know whether their homemade diet was suitable not only for adult maintenance, but also for reproduction, pregnancy, lactation, growth, and development. Healthy reproduction and normal kitten growth leave little room for nutritional mistakes. If the recipe contained significant deficiencies, these demanding life stages would reveal them.

To answer those questions, Katja was allowed two litters of kittens that year, fathered by the male kitten from the rescued cat family. By the end of 1997, the Feline Future study group had grown to eighteen resident participants, creating unprecedented opportunities for long-term observation and record keeping.

Outside interest in the project was growing. As more cat owners encountered the recipe, the website, and the educational materials, two questions began appearing with increasing frequency:

“Do you make the food?”

and

“Can I buy it?”

The Feline Future Kittens

One of the most ambitious goals of the early Feline Future study group was to determine whether a homemade diet could successfully support reproduction, pregnancy, lactation, and normal kitten development.

Katja’s two litters in 1998 provided an opportunity to observe these demanding life stages firsthand. The kittens grew up surrounded by the adult members of the study group, creating a uniquely social environment that allowed their development, behaviour, and health to be observed from birth onward.

The photographs below capture a quieter side of the project. Beyond the recipe, website, booklet, and logistics of making fresh cat food, daily life revolved around cats—sleeping, playing, exploring, and growing up together.

Natascha and Scott answered the growing requests for a ready-to-use raw cat food instead of a recipe in January 1998 by producing one of the first retail frozen raw cat foods available in the Vancouver area.

Many cat owners supported the idea of homemade feeding but lacked the confidence, time, or willingness to prepare the food themselves. To bridge that gap, Feline Future began producing a frozen raw cat food based on the same principles as the recipe it freely shared with cat owners.

Their large kitchen in Burnaby proved ideally suited to this unusual start-up venture. At the same time, a growing network of alternative-minded pet owners, veterinarians, retailers, and educators—including Adored Beast Veterinary Clinic, Dr. Peter Dobias DVM at The Healing Place Veterinary Clinic, Hudson Place Veterinary Clinic, In the Raw, Amore Pet Services and many others—helped connect Feline Future and its new frozen cat food with cat owners throughout the Lower Mainland.

As the project expanded, Feline Future Foundation evolved into the registered partnership “Feline Future Consulting and Products for Feline Husbandry” in February 1998. The rather cumbersome name reflected the founders’ reluctance to pursue a purely commercial path and their conviction that education remained the most powerful form of assistance they could offer cat owners.

Long before frozen raw pet foods became common in pet stores, Feline Future delivered most of its frozen cat food—named Instincts – A Nutriment for Cats—directly to customers throughout the Vancouver area. A 200 g container of hand-crafted homemade fresh cat food made with organic ingredients was sold for a mere $2.25 and home delivery was a $5.00 charge! The family SUV was adorned with vinyl graphics featuring the updated logo and the slogan Taking Cats Back to Their Roots, while embroidered shirts bearing the company logo gave the little enterprise a surprisingly professional appearance.

Their home quickly became a hive of activity. Customers arrived to collect frozen cat food, chicken necks, feeder mice, day-old chicks, and pre-portioned meat blends prepared in the correct proportions for the Feline Future recipe, which continued to be distributed free of charge. Additional products trusted and used with the study cats—including SweetScoop litter, Nature’s Miracle, Kookey Catnip, break-away cat collars, and engraved name tags —were gradually added to the growing catalogue. The new business also celebrated its first 1 million hits on their www.felinefuture.com website, which was constantly being groomed for perfection by Scott.

The educational materials evolved alongside the business. The booklet How to Feed a Carnivore expanded into Nurturing the True Carnivore, featuring new photographs of the study cats, updated nutritional information, the homemade cat food recipe, and an expanded catalogue of products available through Feline Future.

Feline Future Cat Food Recipe Evolution: The 1998 “Recipe for Our Nutriment for Cats”

A small but important addition happened in 1998 to move the recipe even further to a prey-model diet. Gelatin was added to mimic connective tissue of prey, and salt provided a source of sodium normally supplied by the blood of prey, but lacking in retail cuts of meat.

Vitamin B complex was added to the previous version and removed again. The cats in the study group had recurring issues with indigestion, and the B vitamins were falsely thought to be implicated. In fact, the issue with indigestion was later abolished by feeding the study cats twice a day instead of only once, and by removing all vegetables from the diet.

The booklet documented a growing range of offerings, including frozen raw cat food in chicken, rabbit, duck, lamb, and venison varieties; ground meat-heart-liver blends for homemade feeding; frozen mice, chicks, and chicken necks; and a new line of handmade leather cat collars.

Looking back, the booklet appears to be steadily transforming into a book. More importantly, Nurturing the True Carnivore introduced a phrase that would become inseparable from Feline Future’s identity. The term True Carnivore soon became shorthand for the organization’s nutritional philosophy and was eventually abbreviated to the initials “TC”—letters that continue to appear in the TCfeline name today.

Looking back, the entire operation seems wonderfully unconventional. A house full of cats, free nutritional education, frozen raw cat food deliveries, feeder mice in the freezer, customers dropping by throughout the day, and two young founders trying to change how cats were fed all existed under one roof.

The growing study group served as both inspiration and testing ground. Customers were able to see the cats for themselves—healthy, active, and thriving on the same diet Feline Future was recommending. For many visitors, meeting the cats was the highlight of the experience. Some stopped by simply to spend time with them.

By August 1998, Feline Future had grown beyond anything its founders had anticipated. What had begun as an educational foundation had evolved into a busy home-based business serving customers throughout the Vancouver area while maintaining a study group of nineteen cats.

The rapid growth brought challenges that Scott and Natascha had never anticipated. Their rented home had become the centre of an increasingly active operation, receiving customers, preparing frozen cat food, supplying retail stores, and housing the growing study group. Although they believed they were contributing positively to the community, the arrangement had outgrown what their rental property was intended to accommodate.

When their landlord unexpectedly gave them thirty days’ notice to leave, everything changed. Success had overtaken planning because the business had evolved organically. One freezer became several, one customer became many, one recipe became deliveries, one cat became nineteen cats. Nobody sat down and designed that outcome. It happened because each month another opportunity appeared, and with every opportunity came new challenges that two young founders had never imagined they would one day have to solve.

The Crossing, September 21, 1998 — To an Unknown Future

By September 1998, there was no turning back.

Only weeks earlier, Feline Future had been a thriving home-based business in Burnaby. The study group had grown to nineteen cats, frozen raw cat food was being prepared for an expanding customer base, retail stores had begun carrying the products, and the future seemed full of possibility. Then, with only thirty days’ notice, everything had to be packed up and moved.

Finding a new rental with nineteen cats was nearly impossible. Through a cat food client, however, Scott and Natascha learned of an empty house on Salt Spring Island that had previously been home to cats and could offer temporary refuge. It was an unfinished renovation and already on the market for sale, but to them it represented something far more important: a place to land without losing the cats that had become both family and the foundation of Feline Future. Ironically, although it was the cats that had ultimately led to the move, it was the cat community that helped make a future possible.

The furniture travelled in a moving truck.

The cats travelled with Natascha and Scott.

Every member of the study group made the journey together in the company vehicle, crossing from the mainland to Salt Spring Island. They represented the sum of four years of daily observation, rescued lives given a second chance, kittens born into the study and raised on Feline Future’s cat food, and the living foundation upon which Feline Future had been built. Preserving the study group meant preserving the knowledge, the continuity, and the future of everything the founders had worked to create.

No one knew what waited on the island.

There was no permanent place to call home, no established customer base, no nearby suppliers, and no certainty that the young business could survive another beginning. There was only the determination to keep the cats together and continue the work.

This page began with an unexpected gift—a little cat in the snow. It ends with uncertainty—a ferry disappearing toward Salt Spring Island. Between those two moments lies the birth of Feline Future. Not because everything went according to plan, but because two young people kept adapting to whatever life placed in front of them.

By the end of 1998, Feline Future had evolved from a simple rescue effort inspired by one cat into an educational foundation, a growing study group, a practical homemade feeding programme and a small cat food company. The move to Salt Spring Island preserved not only nineteen cats, but also the continuity of what would become one of the longest continuously documented home-based feline feeding studies.

Continue the Story (Currently being prepared. Last updated June 30.2026)

Part Two — Salt Spring Island

The move to Salt Spring Island preserved nineteen study cats and a young business, but everything else had to be built again from the beginning. Continue the story as Feline Future enters its next chapter.

→ Continue to Part Two: The First Salt Spring Years (1999–2003)