I think a wet food dispenser would be fantastic, but you are right in that there are quite a lot of hurdles to it -- spoilage, the often unpleasant smell of wet

I think a wet food dispenser would be fantastic, but you are right in that there are quite a lot of hurdles to it -- spoilage, the often unpleasant smell of wet cat food, the tendency for it to gum up the works as opposed to the more tractable to automation kibble, which merrily rolls along. My gut feeling here says that any solution in this area is going to involve some kind of can engineering, maybe as far back in the chain as having specially designed wet food dispenser cans. Refrigeration, too, would come into play unless you were working on a one-redesigned-can, one-serving paradigm. Perhaps a Peltier cooler with the waste heat going to warm some kind of cat friendly pad, as well as the food once served (given that they are carnivores, I am betting that cats would prefer wet food the approximate temperature of mouse guts). And do not get me started on the struggles of multiple cats, where one or more cats is on a special diet. I think wet food dispensing could honestly be very healthy for cats (or dogs) but we just haven't spent much time engineering for it.