Petivity Smart Feeder – a cat feeder that knows which cat is eating

By Ricardo de Jong ·

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Ginger cat eating from a white Petivity Smart Feeder on a wooden kitchen floor, with a meal-dispensed phone notification

If you have more than one cat, you know the crime scene. The bowl is empty. Two cats are sitting next to it looking innocent. One of them ate twice, and the other one is now yelling at you like it hasn’t eaten since the Obama administration.

The Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats is an automatic feeder with a camera that recognizes each cat’s face, so it can tell you who ate, how much and when. It’s made by Petivity, the pet tech brand of Purina.

Finally, evidence.

Petivity Smart Feeder for Cats, a white automatic feeder with a kibble window, a camera above the bowl and a steel bowl

What is the Petivity Smart Feeder?

It’s a tall white kibble dispenser with a 5-liter food container on top, a camera above the bowl and a stainless-steel bowl at the bottom. You set feeding times in the Petivity app, and it drops a portion between 1/8 cup (12 g) and 3/4 cup (72 g) per meal. You can also feed from your phone and watch a live video.

The clever part is the camera. Purina says the AI was trained on more than 21,000 real feeding sessions, over 1,400 hours of video and images of more than 15,000 cats. It learns the faces of up to five cats in one house and keeps track of how often each one eats and how much it finishes. Petivity announced it on September 21, 2026 (the Amazon listing went up that summer), with a Grand Central event where people pressed a button to feed real shelter cats in three US cities. Very good stunt.

How does it work?

  • The camera and a sensor see which cat is at the bowl, and the app logs the meal.
  • You get an alert when a meal is dispensed and when the kibble runs low.
  • It runs on a USB-C power cord. Add three D-cell batteries (not included) and it keeps feeding for about five days in a power cut.
  • The food container, the kibble carousel and the bowl go in the dishwasher.
  • The bowl is shallow, to avoid “whisker fatigue”.

Petivity says no subscription is needed: the livestream and the eating insights are free. That’s rarer than it should be with pet cameras.

What I like / What could be better

I like that this is one of the few smart feeders that does more than run on a timer. For a vet visit, “Tiger ate 40% less this week” is a lot more useful than “I think he’s been a bit off?” Purina says 99.5% of the cats in its tests ate from the feeder voluntarily, so the shy cat probably won’t boycott it.

The downsides: it’s dry food only. Kibble has to be 5 to 15 mm, and wet, canned or raw food will jam it. It’s also big (16.5 x 8 x 15 inches, 10 lb). The app works in the 48 contiguous US states only. And it’s new: at the time of writing there are only a handful of Amazon ratings and no long-term reviews from a big outlet yet.

Who is the Petivity Smart Feeder for?

Multi-cat homes where one cat is on a diet, one is a senior, or one is a food thief. It’s also a nice gift for the cat person who travels for weekends and texts the cat sitter every three hours.

Skip it if your cats eat wet food, or if you have one cat that eats like a normal animal. A basic timed feeder does that for less. And if your cats need a way out instead of more food, look at the Pawport smart pet door. Bird people can watch the other side of the window with the Birdbuddy 2.

Where can I buy the Petivity Smart Feeder?

It’s on Amazon under the Purina brand for about 150 bucks at the time of writing (October 2026). Petivity also sells it on its own site and through Chewy.

Somebody in your house has been eating the other cat’s dinner. Now you can prove it.