Can cats taste sweet?

By the MeowWise team · Published 13 October 2026 · Last reviewed 13 October 2026

No. Cats almost certainly cannot taste sweetness. One of the two genes needed to build a sweet taste receptor, called Tas1r2, is broken in cats, so their taste buds never make a working sweet sensor. Cats are not drawn to sugar and do not avoid it either. They do taste other things: umami (the savory taste of meat), bitter, sour and salty, and umami appears to be their main "this is good food" signal.

What cats do with sugar

Long before anyone looked at their genes, researchers noticed that cats behave oddly around sweet things. As the Monell Chemical Senses Center team summarized in a 2006 paper in the Journal of Nutrition, domestic cats are neither attracted to nor put off by sugars or by high intensity sweeteners. Most mammals, from mice to dogs to people, prefer sweet solutions when given a choice. Cats do show clear preferences for some amino acids (the building blocks of protein), and they avoid tastes that are bitter or very sour to us.

Recordings from the taste nerves of cats told the same story. The nerves responded to salty, sour and bitter substances and to amino acids and nucleotides, but showed no response to table sugar (sucrose) and several other sugars. So the "missing" taste was specific: everything else seemed to work.

The broken gene behind it

In most mammals, sweet taste depends on a receptor made of two proteins working as a pair, T1R2 and T1R3, coded by the genes Tas1r2 and Tas1r3. In 2005, Xia Li, Joseph Brand and colleagues at Monell, working with the WALTHAM Centre for Pet Nutrition, sequenced both genes in cats and published the results in PLoS Genetics.

• Tas1r3 looked normal. It closely matched working versions in other species and was switched on in the cat's taste buds, as expected.
• Tas1r2 was broken. The cat gene has a 247 base pair deletion in exon 3, plus stop codons in exons 4 and 6, which cut the protein short. The team found no sign of the gene's messenger RNA or protein in taste tissue.
• It is not just one cat. Six unrelated healthy adult domestic cats, a tiger and a cheetah all carried the same kind of deletion and stop codons.

A gene that has stopped working like this is called a pseudogene. Without T1R2, the sweet receptor pair cannot form, so the authors concluded that cats lack the receptor likely needed to detect sweet substances. They also suggested the change was probably an important step in the evolution of cats as strict meat eaters. That fits what we know about cat diets: cats are obligate carnivores whose natural prey contains very little sugar.

What cats can taste: umami comes first

If sweet is out, what makes food taste good to a cat? A 2023 study in Chemical Senses by Scott McGrane and colleagues at the WALTHAM Petcare Science Institute argues that umami, the savory taste, is the main appetitive taste for cats.

• Cats have the umami receptor. The team showed for the first time that cats express Tas1r1, the partner of Tas1r3 in the umami receptor, in their taste papillae.
• Nucleotides switch it on. The cat umami receptor responded to a range of nucleotides, with purine nucleotides (such as inosine monophosphate, found in meat and fish) the most active.
• Amino acids boost it. No amino acid worked alone, but 11 L amino acids strengthened the response when combined with a nucleotide.
• Glutamate is a surprise. Glutamic acid, the classic umami substance for people (think MSG), and aspartic acid did not activate the cat receptor, because of changes at two key binding positions.

The authors suggest that tuna's famous appeal to cats may come, at least partly, from its mix of high inosine monophosphate and free L histidine, which together give a strong boost to umami taste. In behavior tests, cats showed an appetitive response to nucleotides, amino acids and their mixtures.

Cats still taste bitter

One idea was that meat eaters might lose bitter taste too, since bitterness often warns of toxic plants. A 2015 PLOS ONE study by Weiwei Lei and colleagues tested cat bitter receptors in cell based assays and found at least seven working receptors with different ranges of chemicals they respond to, broadly similar to human bitter receptors. Other land living carnivores, including omnivores and plant eaters, had roughly similar numbers. The authors suggest cats may keep bitter taste because both vertebrate and invertebrate prey can contain bitter compounds, or because these receptors have jobs outside the mouth.

What this means for feeding your cat

1. Your cat does not need sweet treats. Sugar adds calories without the taste reward it gives us. Treats should stay a small share of daily calories; see our cat nutrition guide.
2. If your cat licks ice cream or cake, sweetness is not the draw. Cats respond to amino acids and nucleotides, so the protein and savory parts of a food are a more likely pull than its sugar. Dairy upsets many cats, so check our milk myth first.
3. "Sugar free" is not cat safe. Xylitol, found in sugar free gum and some sweets, is on Cornell's list of dangers for cats. Our foods to avoid list and toxic plant and household checker cover the rest.
4. Picky eater? Umami, not sugar, is what a cat's taste buds reward, so focus on a complete and balanced meat based food rather than human treats. A sudden loss of appetite is a reason to call your vet.

Teachers can use this as a neat example of how a sense matches an animal's diet; our cat adaptations lesson plan covers taste. Every paper cited here is listed with its DOI on our cat research page.

General education, not veterinary advice. If you are worried about your cat, contact your veterinarian; in an emergency, go to the nearest emergency vet.