SuperZoo rumors: what the pet food companies are saying

I’ve got two little bits of inside information for you, via some folks I met at SuperZoo.  I spoke to people from Canidae, and people from Natural Balance, both companies which have been subject to new recalls and/or Internet innuendo over the past couple of months.  Here’s what I was told:

  • I asked someone at Canidae about the acetaminophen rumours.  I was told that Canidae had tested their own food numerous times since that report, and had not found any acetaminophen.  Then I was told… pause for suspense… the the person who made the original claim against Canidae has made similar claims against other companies in the past, and that perhaps this person is just looking for some sort of quick cash in an out-of-court settlement.  Just one person’s opinion, of course, but this person was eager to talk about it, and seemed confident of what they were saying.


  • At the Natural Balance booth, we were happy to find out that Eatables will soon be returning to the stores.  All Eatables were recalled about two months ago because the human food plant where they were manufactured was shut down by the FDA.  A human food product (a chili sauce) was found to be infected with botulism, so everything made at the factory had to be recalled.  Natural Balance did a bunch of tests on their Eatables and none were found to be contaminated, but nevertheless, they all had to be destroyed.  It’s sad when the company that goes the extra mile to have quality ingredients ends up getting the short end of the stick because of unhealthy human food!  A new manufacturing facility for Eatables has been found (another human facility), and the products will soon be back in production.  Our little dogs really loved the Eatables foods, and you could tell from just looking at them and smelling them that the ingredients were fabulous.


  • This isn’t a rumour, per se, but I’ll put it here anyway.  Look for new “freeze-dried raw” foods to hit the speciality petfood store shelves soon.  It’s raw food with the water removed, so it kind of looks like flat kibble, but it’s not uniform in size and really does look like it’s just been crumbled from a large dry sheet.  ZiwiPeak is one brand which comes to mind - they make both a dog and cat freeze-dried food.  I guess it’s good if you want the convenience of dry with the benefits of raw, but I can’t recall if anyone promised me that the nutrients in freeze-dried food are identical to their raw forms.  It’s just hard to imagine that nothing would change except water.  I fed some ZiwiPeak dry raw cat food along with regular raw food, and the cats overwhelmingly preferred the fresh, wet food.  They normally like kibble, too, but they ate the ZiwiPeak very slowly, and a couple of them just walked away from their dishes.  I can tell you that the dogs loved the food when I accidentally fed it to them first!


  • One last thing… some pet food companies have now taken to stating the obvious on their labels, just in case anyone had questions.  Check out the sticker on this bag of Evo (click the image to enlarge it:

no_Melamine

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 09/29 at 01:23 AM

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