Everything in her world has just changed at once: the rooms, the sounds, the people, the routine. Food is the one thing that can stay predictable from the first evening, and predictability is what a newly adopted cat needs while she works out that the new home is safe. Chopping and changing between foods in week one, however well meant, adds digestive upheaval to emotional upheaval and makes it impossible to tell which change caused which effect.
Start With One Complete Food, Suited to Her Age
Choose one good complete food matched to her life stage: kitten food for a kitten, adult food for an adult, with the label's word complete as the key detail. Offer small regular meals at set times rather than one large bowl left down all day, because a set rhythm lets you see exactly what she eats at each sitting, and uneaten food is information rather than background noise. Keep meals in a quiet spot away from the litter tray and from household traffic, and put fresh water in more than one place while she is still mapping the home. If the rescue or previous owner can tell you what she was eating, feeding that food for the first days and transitioning gradually puts the least strain on her stomach; if nobody knows, do not let the gap stall you, because a consistent new food starting tonight beats a perfect food starting next week.
Watching Appetite and the Litter Tray While She Settles
For the first week or two, you are gathering her baseline. Note how much she eats at each meal, whether she approaches eagerly or needs coaxing, and what her litter tray shows: formed stools, looseness after the stress of the move, or nothing at all. A shy cat may eat only at night at first, so check the bowl in the morning before concluding she has eaten nothing. Mild appetite wobble and a day of softer stools are common under rehoming stress, but a cat who eats nothing at all for more than a day, vomits repeatedly, strains in the tray, or seems flat and unwell should be seen by a vet promptly rather than coaxed with ever-changing foods.
Write these observations down while they are fresh. At her first vet visit, which is worth booking in the early weeks anyway, that record answers half the questions the vet will ask.
Exploring Preferences Gradually, One Change at a Time
Once she is settled and eating reliably, preferences become a fair subject. Explore them gradually: a different texture, a new protein, wet alongside dry, introduced one change at a time and given several days each, so a loose stool or a refusal can be traced to its cause. One change at a time also protects the stability you built; a cat who goes off one new food still has her settled staple to fall back on at the next meal. Rotate nothing rapidly, and treat treats as tiny extras while her main diet is still being established. Resist the urge to tempt a hesitant eater with a different food at every meal; a shy cat offered five foods in five days learns to hold out for novelty, while a cat offered one food calmly, in a quiet corner, with time to approach it alone, usually begins eating once the house goes still. Warming wet food very slightly can release its smell and help a nervous cat register it as food, and sitting nearby without watching her directly often gives her the confidence to start.
KinsLe fits naturally into those first weeks: feeding times and tray notes recorded in Care Teams keep everyone in the household reading from the same record of what she ate, meal by meal.