A year ago, I was invited to speak about “super premium pet foods” at Petfood Forum, an annual symposium presented by Petfood Industry, a trade and marketing organization. Exhibitors at the event include pet food ingredient suppliers, manufacturers, laboratories, and packaging suppliers. Attendees include pet food company employees and executives. And there I was, an industry critic, invited to talk about how Whole Dog Journal identified a top-quality dog food.
The timing was odd, because the pet food recalls were still being discussed in the nightly news, and the list of affected products was still expanding daily. The overall mood at the event, unlike industry trade shows I’ve attended in the past, was somber. I heard gossip in the elevators at the event hotel each morning about products whose representatives were present at the event. “Oh my,” people would say to each other. “I just talked to those guys yesterday. I wonder if they will be here today.” There was a definite sense that almost any company present at the event could be implicated in the disaster at any time. “It could happen to any one of us,” I heard again and again.
Adding to the strange atmosphere was the fact that the organizers had hired extra security for the event, and closer attention was being paid to event identification badges than at any trade show I’ve ever been to. An insert in the registration package that participants received at the show discussed the possibility that members of the press could attempt to infiltrate the event; it even suggested steps that attendees could take if approached by a member of the media or “if someone is disruptive or is bothering you.”
Given the circumstances, I was impressed that the organizers did not find a reason to uninvite me to the event! I was glad, because as it turned out, I had a number of intensely educational conversations with pet food industry representatives who seemed to have been pressed by all the tumult into self-reflection and openness – words that don’t usually get applied to executives in that industry.
The year, organizers have expanded the event and added an extra day, “Petfood Focus on Safety,” to address steps that are being taken industry-wide to prevent further pet food disasters. I’m very eager to learn whether there have been significant changes in the industry’s standard operating procedure – and whether the movers and shakers of the industry remain shaken by the recalls of 2007 or have returned to business as usual. I think this will be an ideal time to determine which companies have really moved their quality control procedures forward, and which ones just pay lip service to quality assurance.
As always, I’ll be looking for information that consumers can use to identify safe, top-quality pet foods. Given that our June issue will contain a review of frozen meat-based pet foods, I’ll be doing some special investigating to determine what the makers of premium foods do to secure, test, and process their protein sources.
