To investigate the role of palatability, Petfood industries usually use expert panels of cats trained to discriminate food with different sensory properties. In the usual testing procedure, cats have the choice between two different diets presented simultaneously and available for several hours. The quantity of each food eaten and the dynamic of the consumption of each food during the test are used as indices of food palatability. The aim of our study was to enrich the classical palatability criteria by looking for differences in the behaviour of cats which could be attributed to palatability perception. To our knowledge only one study has examined the behaviour of cats during a food test (Van den Bos et al., 2000). In their study, cats were presented successively two canned diets differing in their level of palatability. The complete duration of each test session did not exceed 30 min and the cats were under their usual diet the rest of the time. The authors then described a “hedonic” taste reactivity pattern where cats licked and sniffed the feeding bowl, licked their lips and groomed their face, and an “aversive” taste reactivity pattern where cats licked and sniffed the food and licked their nose. Based on these results we decided to study the behaviour of cats at feeding occasions using two different dry food diets between which a known difference of palatability has been established using the classical expert panel evaluation. Dry food is strategic for petfooders because it is the most popular form of diet given and bought by pet owners (Crane et al., 2000). In order to respect the natural feeding rhythm of cats, each test lasted 20 h with the diet continuously available.