At home, feeding notes can afford to be brief because you are the person reading them, filling gaps from habit without noticing. A cattery team reads them cold, possibly at a busy morning round, with many cats waiting and no way to ask what a scribbled abbreviation meant. Before her first stay, the notes change their job: they stop reminding you and start instructing strangers. The content stays the same six entries it always was, precisely which food and flavor she eats, the texture it comes in, how much is served each meal in your household's measures, when those meals happen, the treats permitted for her, and what she must never be given, but every entry must now stand alone without your voice explaining it.
Translating Household Measures for Strangers
The amount per meal is where home notes most often fail in translation. A scoop, a handful or half a tin means something exact in your kitchen and something vague in anyone else's, because scoops differ, tins differ and handfuls differ more. Keep your household's measures as the record, since consistency at home matters most across her life, yet write each one out in full for the cattery version: which scoop, filled how, from which bag, or what fraction of which size of tin or pouch. If you can, show the measure beside the food when you drop her off, or send a photograph of the filled scoop with the notes, so the written words have a picture to anchor them.
Apply the same plainness to the food itself. Name the exact food and flavor in full, describe its texture in ordinary words such as chunks in gravy, a smooth loaf or dry biscuits, and state whether the two are mixed, served separately or offered at different meals. Staff feeding many cats work from what the sheet says, and a sheet that says merely her usual food asks them to guess at the one detail her stomach cares about.
Treats, Meal Times and the Never-Given Line
Approved treats deserve their own clear sentence rather than a mention inside the food description. Name which treats she may have, how many in a day, and whether they are part of her routine or only for coaxing a shy cat to eat, since generous staff can unknowingly add a sizeable extra meal across a week's stay. Meal times should be given as the times you keep at home, with a note about how much drift she tolerates, so the cattery can fit her into its rounds without serving breakfast hours away from her expectation.
Anything she must never be given matters more than any other line on the sheet during a stay, because a cattery is an environment full of other cats' foods. State the prohibition plainly, say whether the reason is an intolerance, a vet's instruction or a food she steals that harms her, and ask for the sheet to be kept with her pen rather than only in the office file. At booking, have the cattery's agreed terms set down in writing, covering stay dates, feeding arrangements, fees and delay plans, so the notes and the commercial agreement support each other if anything is later disputed.
Supplying the Food and Checking on Return
Send her own food for the whole stay plus a small extra margin, labeled, so the notes describe what is actually in front of staff rather than a house substitute the cattery keeps. If the cattery insists on feeding its own food in some circumstances, resolve that difference before the stay, not in the notes afterwards, and amend the written routine to match the agreement. On collection, ask how she ate: which meals she finished, whether any entry confused the team, and whether the measures as written produced the portions you intended. Correct the notes from those answers while the stay is fresh, because her second stay will inherit whatever this one teaches you. Pet Passport in KinsLe preserves the expanded cattery wording of all six entries as part of her record, so the next booking starts from instructions already proven to work.