http://thepetfoodlist.com/petfoods_pg2.htm

“The food passed our initial inspections, though it was near the high end of our target density range. Our previous manufacturer’s product was near the low end of the acceptable density range.”

This is the problem with a specification that simply calls out a range rather than a target. You can be anywhere in the range and not have anything “officially” wrong with the product.

But if you have a *target* (for example, smack dab in the middle of the range from low to high), now you start to ring the alarm bells when you deviate from that target - the farther the deviation, the more concerned the QC inspector should become.

No manufacturing process will ever hit a target dead on all the time - variability around a target is a fact of life. The objective is to monitor that variability, and to know how much your process is varying, and how that affects your products’ critical characteristics, and to adjust accordingly.

Specifications that simply accept anything within a “low to high” range cannot do that.

It saddens me that the PF companies didn’t learn anything after the 2007 recall. QC and monitoring product and supply chain should be of utmost importance to them. Looks like business as usual.

Katie

What I hope is that there arent still dogs out there being fed this food and getting sick. This reminds me of what happened with our kitty in Dec 2006. Kept feeding her food and she kept vomiting. We had no idea what was going on until 5 days after she died. Now some say this isnt the same as the food doesnt have toxins in it. But I can tell you that it doesnt take poison or toxins to make a pet deathly ill. For those pets that are already compromised with health issues such as kidney problems, cancer, etc eating this food could be very detrimental to them.

Now if you go on their site, they say this:

Q: If your kibble is made at a different facility, how do you guarantee product quality?

A: In order to make our proprietary and innovative diets, we partner with high quality manufacturers that share our passion for safety and ingredient integrity. Our team is dedicated to developing and enforcing our quality control standards – including ingredient specifications, sourcing certifications, testing, and product safety. On-site inspections and continuous monitoring are some of the steps we take to insure product quality. You can be assured that our team is strongly committed to providing safe and nutritious foods for your special pets.

So this leads me to my next question, if they have such wonderful QC monitoring on site, why did this food make it past inspection? Did they know it was a problem but sold it anyhow? Did they not know it was a problem and if so, why, when they have such a strong committment to safe food?

So what I see is another company that didnt learn anything from the 2007 pet food recalls and an attempt at a stealth recall that has gone awry..they say they dont even know what caused the nutrient dense problem to occur, they THINK its having to do with the steam extractor….

Anyhow, need I say more? Sorry for the long post.

What can we possibly feed our dogs—and ourselves—in confidence?

I only just the other day bought chicken Instinct for my dog (not from the bad batch though, thank goodness), so seeing this story really kind of turns me off from continuing to buy it.

Their current manufacturer appears on thepetfoodlist website. I wonder if Therese would have any luck getting them to name the “new” manufacturer?