Saturday, May 19, 2007 , terribly early in the morning

You’d think the recalls would be finished by now… but no

I thought I should post about the latest “large” recall of dry pet foods manufactured by Chenango Valley.  The big brands on the list are Drs. Foster & Smith, 8-in-1 Ferret (is this the first non-dog or cat food to be recalled?), and Evolve Kitten.  You can see the entire list here:  Chenango Valley Pet Foods press release.  The foods are being recalled because of the possibility of cross-contamination, not because they themselves contain any recalled ingredients.  I especially wanted to mention this because I know Evolve is a popular brand with our friends in Singapore, but I don’t know if the food they buy is manufactured in the US.  Something to watch out for, anyway.

On the subject of cross-contamination, I had a dog biscuit “incident” recently which made me laugh (because crying took too much energy).  I bought a one pound, $4 bag of “VitaLife All Natural Dog Biscuits” in chicken and barley flavour.  The biscuits only have nine, nice-sounding ingredients, and no preservatives or artificial colours.  I opened the bag to dump it into the “cookie jar”, and out came a bunch of chicken and barley biscuits, plus one stowaway.  Here’s a photo (click to see a larger version):

bad_cookie

The boring brown biscuit on the left is what is supposed to be in the bag.  That glowing green biscuit on the right, the faux-Milkbone, is a “cheapest of the cheap” generic dog biscuit, the kind which are sold ten pounds for five dollars.  This tells me something.  It tells me that expensive VitaLife biscuits, which are supposedly “Made with Love.  Naturally.” are actually “Made at the same time as cheap stuff.  Naturally.” At the very least, the equipment used to make my nine-ingredient premium biscuits is also touching the non-premium biscuits.  In this instance, I don’t necessarily care, but what if I had a dog with severe food allergies to something in the stowaway biscuit?  Given the current ripple running through the pet food industry because of cross-contamination issues, this just wasn’t a good time for this sort of screw up to happen.  The company name on the biscuits is Normerica (Product of Canada).  Their website says they own five manufacturing plants in Canada, the US, and China, so I’m not sure where these biscuits would have been made.  The way the pet food industry works, they could have been made in China but listed as “Product of Canada” because a Canadian company owns the plant.  The company supplies a lot of something to Kroger, because they link to a “Best Supplier” award they received from the grocery store chain.

I thought it was an interesting story, especially because it was an extreme contrast between “high end” and “low end”.  The VitaLife biscuits certainly aren’t the “highest of the high-end”, but they definitely cost a lot more than their little green buddies.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 05/19 at 04:27 AM
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