Purina’s pet technology brand, Petivity, launched a dry-food feeder for cats on September 21, 2026. It uses a camera to work out which cat is eating. The Petivity Smart Feeder costs $149.99 in the United States and can track meals for up to five cats. Petivity says there is “no subscription required”, and live video and eating insights are “always free”. It does not stop one cat from eating another’s food, and Petivity says so on its own product page. For a multi-cat home, that single limit decides whether this feeder is the right tool or whether a microchip feeder is.
What Petivity launched on September 21
The press release says the feeder is “available now for $149.99 at Amazon, Chewy and Petivity.com”. When we checked Petivity’s own store on September 22, the product page listed the price and showed it as sold out. The retailers named are all American, and the release says nothing about the UK, Canada or Europe.
The feeder identifies cats with “AI-enabled facial recognition” from a built-in camera, combined with sensors in the bowl. Petivity says the model was trained on more than 21,000 real-world feeding sessions, over 1,400 hours of video and images of more than 15,000 cats. The acceptance figure in the release, 99.5 percent, comes from a small test. The product page explains it as “199 out of 200 cats ate from the feeder in final testing”.
It works with Petivity’s Smart Litter Box Monitor, so owners who already use that device can “track consumption and elimination side by side” in the same app. A cat that eats less and visits the litter box less often shows up in both records at once.
The part it cannot do
Petivity’s product page includes a comparison table with three columns: its own feeder, standard automatic feeders and microchip feeders. In the row “Prevents food stealing”, the Petivity feeder gets a No and microchip feeders get a Yes. The page repeats it in plain words: “The feeder can’t stop one cat from eating another’s meal.”
What the feeder offers instead is a record. “If one cat’s meal is dispensed but another one eats it, you’ll find out,” the page says. That is useful if you are trying to find out why one cat is gaining weight. It does not help if one cat is on a prescription diet the other must not eat, because by the time the app tells you, the food is gone.
A microchip or RFID feeder keeps its lid closed until the right cat’s chip is read. So for strict diets, that design still wins. For households that only want to know who is eating how much, face recognition avoids a collar tag and needs no chip registration.
Specifications that matter before you order
The feeder holds 5 liters of kibble and dispenses between 1/8 cup, or 12 grams, and 3/4 cup, or 72 grams, per meal. It takes dry kibble from 5 to 15 mm across and “can’t support canned, wet food or raw food”. If any of your cats eats wet food, this feeder covers only part of its diet, and the intake figures in the app will be incomplete.
Power comes from a 5V 2A USB-C cord that is included. The backup is three D-cell alkaline batteries that are not included, and Petivity markets it as a 5-day backup battery. It measures 16.5 by 8 by 15 inches and weighs 10 lb. The app needs iOS 15 or later or Android 11 or later. Petivity offers a 90-day refund guarantee and a one-year limited warranty.
Petivity’s product page does not list the Wi-Fi band. It also does not say whether the camera records video, whether any footage or face data is stored in the cloud, or for how long. Those are fair questions for any camera placed in a kitchen, and our checklist for smart pet device security covers what to look for in a privacy policy.
How it compares on cost
A close rival is the PETLIBRO Granary 2 Vision Duo, a two-bowl camera feeder that recognizes which pet is at which bowl and weighs what each one eats with built-in scales. Live view and the scale data are free on that feeder, while recording, playback and eating-habit alerts sit behind PETLIBRO’s subscriptions.
Petivity has taken the opposite approach and put every feature of this feeder in the base price. Over three years, the difference is the full cost of whichever PETLIBRO plan you would otherwise buy. The trade is that the Granary 2 Vision Duo measures intake by weight at each bowl, while Petivity relies on a camera and bowl sensors at a single bowl, and Petivity has not published an accuracy figure for its recognition.
Who it suits
The Petivity Smart Feeder makes most sense in a home with two to five cats on the same dry food, where the question is who is eating what. It also fits owners who already use the Smart Litter Box Monitor and want food and litter data together.
It is the wrong choice for a cat on a prescription diet in a shared home, for wet or raw feeding, and for buyers outside the United States until Petivity names other markets. If you order, the 90-day refund window gives you time to see whether your cats accept it and whether the app’s per-cat records match what you see at the bowl.
