On board with Bobby Flay: The 7 products he always carries when traveling with his cats

Cat moms and dads, take note: Bobby Flay hears you. He sees you. And he’s here to speak out for every ignored, overlooked, maligned owner of felines, those four-legged creatures dubbed aloof and haughty and indifferent.

“I feel like the cat parent is the forgotten pet parent. Dogs get all the juice, so to speak,” he says.

Flay is deeply attached to his two cats, Nacho and Stella, currently holding court on his spacious kitchen counter in New York City. And they’re the reason he’s gotten into the pet food business, creating a line of premium chow named Made by Nacho, after — well, you can figure it out. The stuff is solid: This writer’s cat, a chronic vomiter, hasn’t upchucked once since switching over to Flay’s brand. He worked on the line for three years before launching it, turning down numerous endorsement deals in favor of doing it himself.

“I was an only child and I’m still an only child. And so, because I was an only child and my mom always had two or three cats, they were literally my siblings. I joke around that I was raised by cats. And so they’ve always been an important part of my life,” Flay says. “I have to say, as a cat person, or a cat parent, I was always not really sure what to feed them. I feed people every day in my life, my entire career in one way, shape or form or another. And I was looking at these guys and I was like, ‘I need to take this and really do something. And I’m going to do it the way I do everything else, which is from scratch.’”

If you’re making cheese, chips or pretty much anything intended for human consumption, you have taste testers and test kitchens. So it begs the question: Did Flay’s cats try his own cat food? That’s where his employees and his own pets came into play. “We have cats all over our team, and so they literally are the taste testers. If Nacho and Stella don’t like something, it doesn’t hit the shelves. They eat most things, but not everything,” he says.

As for Flay, he plans on expanding the line. And promoting it involves heavy travel. So as a pet parent, here’s what it takes to make an otherwise painful process — as anyone who has flown with a cat can attest — relatively simple.

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