Cat Mate C300 Automatic 3 Meal Pet Feeder with Digital Timer (366) - for Cats or Small Dogs, for Wet and Dry Pet Food, Meals up to 0.73 lb Each, White

EDIT: Although I still love this product, after eight months it has become unreliable. Sometimes it opens almost all the way and stops, sometimes it doesn't rotate and open at all. It also is opening much much slower than it used to. The batteries are new. Something has gone wrong and I can't figure out what. It's never been dropped or come in contact with water. The clock works fine all the time ... it's just that I can no longer feel confident my girl will be fed on time if I'm not here to open and change the dish if it malfunctions. I hate to spend the money to replace it if there's a chance of the same outcome. Still leaving it as a 5 star hoping mine is the exception. ~~~~~~~~ PERFECT solution to feeding my food/treat motivated miniature poodle. She's on a prescription diet and eats 3 smaller meals daily. Sometimes I can't be home when she needs to eat and this makes both of our lives better. When her internal clock tells her it's close to meal time Piper will hang out near the feeder and the second she hears the gears start turning, she's ON IT (did I mention she looooves food?) It's very easy to set the timer and you can adjust it anytime you need to. This one has two timers as well as a digital clock on it. There are 3 compartments ... one is open/uncovered for first feeding and two that are safely covered until the timer rotates the compartments. The compartments will hold a good amount of food for a cat or smaller dog. This model won't accommodate quite a cup of kibble though, so probably won't work for a large dog. There are 3 pieces to this feeder not counting the freeze pack. It's very well made and quite sturdy. I bought an extra ice/freeze pack because sometimes I forget to pop it in the freezer in the evening. I recommend doing that unless you only feed kibble, in which case you won't need the freeze pack at all. All in all, this has been a life changer for me.

Decent feeder. I use this on weekends when visiting my long distance boyfriend. One dish is open before the first timer for meal one goes off. Once the meal is opened at its set time, it stays open until the next schedule feed, which is good for cats who graze. Sometimes my cat eats all the food and other times not. But he does this I think because I’m not there and he likes when I’m around to eat. The cooling feature, works so so. I don’t mind leaving it not cooled as he eats canned food that isn’t cooled normally and it sits out for a bit while he grazes.

This little feeder has been one of my best Amazon purchases ever! I bought it to portion control and to keep my cat from waking me up too early for his breakfast. Not only did it get him on a feeding schedule for life, but it's still working perfectly after 6 years. I purchased a second one for a new cat we adopted because I knew the first one held up so well. It's easy to use, easy to clean and best of all it's MADE TO LAST.

UPDATE: My kittens have used both of these a ton in the last few months and have never opened it up again. This leads me to believe it was user error. I love these feeders and they always work. Changing my vote to a 5/5. Original review: I guess before I start the review, I should mention what kind of cats I have. I have 2. I feed them a completely raw diet only and that makes it difficult to always be there to feed them 3 times a day. They brothers, but their breeds are a little different. One is American Shorthair, Siberian, and Turkish Angora. The other is American Shorthair, Siberian, Ragdoll, and Maine Coon. The Turkish Angora is insane when it comes to food and treats. Now the review, I want to love this product, I really do. I had hoped to put Freeze Dried treats in the compartments for almost all occasions so if I was out of town I wouldnt have to deal with Frozen Raw Food. The timer is awesome, I was able to eye sync it to the time on my phone, the mechanism is great as well. Where the product fails is the enclosure. My Turkish Angora was able to either flip it over and pin the machine against something and PRY the top off. Yikes. Clearly they are both a little too healthy and active. If the manufacturer could make the pins that you have to open the top harder to open I would appreciate it. Maybe make the indents that stick out longer so there's more grab. Besides that this is pretty good and if you have a cat that is not drunk for treats or food 24/7 I would highly recommend it. I will still use mine, as maybe this was just a fluke. Hard to say when it was the first day using it. I will update the score if it never happens again in a few months.

This feeder works ok to serve 2 meals (not three) at a later time, but I wouldn't count on them staying cold for very long if you're serving wet food. First, the timer and the actual distribution of food work as advertised. The timer is accurate and dispenses food as expected. The bowl and cover are easy to clean and are both dishwasher safe. The positives pretty much end there however as it's very misleading to call this a 3 meal feeder when the first meal is always open and ready to be eaten. If you're looking for three covered meals you're only going to get two. More disappointing, however, is the coldness of the ice pack after 8 hours. The pack remains semi-cool but I used a meat thermometer to measure the temperature of the cat food in the bowl and it was about 63°. This is certainly better than room temperature but not exactly chilled. The most disappointing and stupid aspect of this feeder is that the final meal is not even above the ice pack. It sits above the battery compartment, so forget about having two chilled meals for later. This is a major design flaw that I don't see an easy solution for because the timer needs to be near the battery pack and unless you made the open compartment near the timer display, you're never going to get the ice pack below both of the two meals that need to be chilled. This might not be a big deal for some but since I only feed my cat wet food it kind of makes this feeder fairly useless for keeping wet food cold for any significant amount of time. And unfortunately there are no real semi-soft cat foods anymore so if you're going to use this as a feeder, then dry food is pretty much the only way to go. This of course defeats the entire purpose of having the ice pack and reduces this product to a simple timed feeder that I'm sure there are less expensive alternatives available for.

I bought this for my Toy Poodle puppy who sometimes has to be by himself during the day and has to eat more than twice a day because of his small breed. This feeder has worked out perfectly. It has worked without fail so far and easy to set. I bought this style because I feed him wet food and the separate refreezable ice pack is perfect. He has come to know the sound the feeder makes when turning and comes running (I have watched him on my phone through a camera I have set up at home for monitoring him). This is one of the best purchases I have ever made. It was inexpensive and is exactly what I needed for my puppy. He now just needs one of the automatic feedings. If you don't use all three compartments (two are for the auto feed and one is for the immediate feed that you give your pet) you can leave one of the compartments empty and turn the auto feed off on that compartment. Just be careful to be sure you fill the correct compartment for the auto feed. The tray moves counter-clockwise. The first time I cut back to one auto feed meal, I filled the wrong one and my poor pup missed his lunch. the tray has numbers on it, numbered 0 for the initial feeding and 1 & 2 for the auto feeds. Just be sure to place the tray in the correct position . I have been using this feeder for about 6 weeks now.

The first one malfunctioned and stopped rotating correctly and wouldn’t line up with the opening. Confused, I tried to force it back into place which broke the rotation mechanism (it warns not to do that, I saw the warning too late). I figured since the first time it broke had some element of human error I would shell out to replace the unit. It was past the return window. Until only 3 months after purchasing another unit the same thing started happening. It’s like the electronics in this thing malfunction extremely easily. It either rotates forever and randomly stops halfway between trays or doesn’t rotate at all, and some random days works as expected. My poor hungry cat has to come ask for food which defeats the purpose of this thing, and it’s so irritating to take the top off and find wasted lukewarm meals that were never rotated to the opening. I know I’m programming it correctly because it worked fine for about two months then started randomly malfunctioning. The ice pack design is also poorly executed. There is no insulation, the ice pack is insufficient in its placement under the meals, and melts after a few hours. If left in the unit more than that the whole unit starts to smell like mildew which lingers. I live in a desert so it’s not like it’s very humid here, I think the design it just not very effective to keep everything cool and the condensation breeds mildew in the warm enclosed environment. Just all around a terrible experience with this product. I wish I could get the $90 I wasted on two of these malfunctioning units back.

I bought two of these to keep my cats fed on schedule if we are out for the day, and so that friends/family could come by just once in a day to set there cats up for the whole day of meals. It’s most basic function is timing the release of wet or raw food. However the digital clocks in these is so cheap that after even 1 day they are out of sync by several seconds, which of course gets longer day-by-day. If you have more than one cat and one, or all of them, compete for food, you know this is a huge problem. Somebody will bo overeating, and in-turn somebody won’t be getting enough. The clocks also seem to have a problem when you intend to set it up for a dinner and then breakfast feeding rather than all meals being in one day. It will reorder the times entered so that the earlier time is always first. I figured it wouldn’t matter as it should just operate at the programmed times regardless of position on the list. But the one time we tried it one of the feeders did not spin to feed the second meal when set up for that. I need to test further to see what happened. The cooling pack is useless. Undersized and poorly positioned, it will not keep the food any fresher than without it. Plus since each only comes with one, somebody has to wait for the pack to re-freeze the next day. Ideally it should come with two that you swap out every other day. Unless your cats aren’t really interested in food you will have to mount these onto a board or something. When I first used them I had hoped this wouldn’t be necessary, but they are so lightweight my cats flipped them over and pushed/dragged them into various corners of the neighboring rooms. The entire inside gets a nice coating of food smeared all over, and the cats don’t get fed very well. The plastics it’s made of is also very soft and had bite and claw gouges after the first use making it more difficult to clean. Great place for bacteria to hide. The motor that spins the bowl is very cheap and noisy. It took much longer than anticipated to get the cats used to this before feeling they could be left alone with it and everyone would get a fair chance atbveing fed rather than just the bravest one.