There are a couple of interesting newspaper articles related to the pet food recall today. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on a Seattle couple participating in a class action suit against Menu Foods:
…on Thursday, a United States federal court issued an order that prevents the company [ed. i.e. Menu Foods] from coming in contact with U.S. pet owners.
“(That kind of order) doesn’t happen often, but sometimes in class-action litigation, before everything is certified, a defendant will try to settle with folks, thinking they can kind of slip it through,” Berman said.
For the Mitchells [ed. the Seattle couple], a $300 vet bill isn’t anything to go to court over. But hundreds of tainted pet food products recalled over the space of weeks — that’s another matter. “It took so long for this to come out,” Cecily Mitchell said. “They had to know.”
My guess is that a lot of pet owners feel about the same way.
The Chicago Tribune has an article today reporting on what I predicted early in the recall—a realignment in the pet food market, noting that business is booming for natural pet food manufacturers:
The recall of contaminated pet food that began in March after a series of mysterious dog and cat deaths has turned into a bonanza for specialty pet food businesses. And some suggest the landscape could change for good.
Wary of melamine-tainted ingredients from China, consumers and businesses alike are putting a new emphasis on safety, nutrition and quality.
It’s fueling big growth for some independent manufacturers and retailers. Meanwhile, makers whose products were pulled from store shelves are facing their toughest challenge ever: winning back customers’ trust.
“Consumers got a wake-up call that some of these premium brands at large-format stores weren’t a premium grade, just a premium brand,” said Phil Brasie, president of Middle West Distributors in West Chicago, where sales of specialty pet foods are up 30 percent to 35 percent since the first pet food recall by Canadian-based Menu Foods. “They started to go out for these more holistic, better nutrition foods. The demand was so fast, so quick.”
Here’s the part of the article I found interesting:
Prior to the recall, many manufacturers did not know the country of origin for every ingredient that goes into their products. That is changing. After the recall, Newman’s Own Organics wanted to find out the source of the ingredients used in its entire pet food line. It took weeks to research the answer for a single product, its adult dog food. The company confirmed that every ingredient, from fresh, human-grade chicken free of antibiotics, to the vitamins, comes from U.S. sources, according to Peter Meehan, chief executive of Newman’s Own Organics.
From the outset of the pet food recall, Newman’s Own Organics prominently posted a note on its Web site saying its pet foods were not part of the recall and do not include wheat gluten or rice protein concentrate.
The move was “brilliant,” said Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Cereal Byproducts, a Mt. Prospect-based ingredient supplier, is still reeling from the discovery that the rice protein concentrate it purchased through a domestic importer from Chinese supplier Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. was tainted with melamine. Cereal Byproducts had shipped the product to three customers in the Midwest. “It’s very disturbing,” said Jim Tofilon, president of the employee-owned firm. “You trust people to do the right thing, but people are unscrupulous.”
The company began purchasing the Chinese-made rice protein in July. “They were sending it in with an FDA registration number. As far as we knew, this product was good,” Tofilon said.
After dropping an angry comment here at The Glittering Eye a few weeks ago, Mr. Tofilon has not responded to my emails offering him a platform to tell his side of the story.
The article continues:
But the problem isn’t necessarily the location of the plant, said Tom Nieman, owner of Fromm Family Foods, a 103-year-old, fourth-generation, family-run company in Mequon, Wis., which manufactures premium dry dog food in Wisconsin and — for the past three years — hand-packed canned food in a human-grade plant in China.
“We went over there and literally showed them how to make it,” he said. “You have to have enough control so you can guarantee the quality to your customer.”
Besides on-site inspections from Chinese food safety officials and certifications from the Food and Drug Administration and European inspectors, Fromm has an expert in Hong Kong who checks on production, and the company also paid to bring Canadian food inspectors over to check the facilities, Nieman said. “We try to bring pet food up to the level of human food.”
In testimony before the U.S. House subcommittee on oversight and investigations on April 24, Paul Henderson, president and chief executive of Menu Foods based in Ontario, Canada, also pointed to a list of government inspections and private audits of its facilities.
“This is not a situation where lax inspection of Menu allowed a problem to occur,” Henderson said. “Inspections of our plants would not have prevented the melamine contamination of the wheat gluten.”
But a closer look at the Chinese supplier might have made a difference, Nieman said. “This was a poor purchasing decision on one ingredient,” he said.
There is no substitute for on-site intelligence, particularly when dealing with an overseas supplier who is beyond the reach of the U. S. civil liability system.
