Years of tainted Pet Food from China

NY Time and Reuters have now reported that melamine, used to make plastic, has been added to grains and gluten by some Chinese companies to boost the real protein content of pet food. This has been happening FOR YEARS.

What now?

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I have 5 cats that died since 2000 that I am convinced got sick from food, (with a little help from vaccines tossed in for bad measure)

How will we know when our job is done?
-Kim of Petfoodtracker

(Kim along with Ben of Itchmo, Nikki of Howl911, Theresa of PetsitUSA and of course Gina and Christine of Petconnection are the brilliant bloggers tracking this pet food recall crisis, go there and read, and donate too!)

I'll give some advice to the pet food companies on what to do next. (Will they listen to a Brain in a Box? I doubt it, but I have to try.)


1) Stop treating this like a recall of a defective product. This is food that kills living things. Not a product whose malfunction causes an inconvenience. This is not Dell recalling batteries. Think Johnson and Johnson recalling Tylenol. That is your shorthand message. Learn it. Live it. Love it.

2) Listen to your real customers, people with pets. People tell you that, but I know many CEOs DON'T know what their real end users really think. Who do CEOs see as their customer? Wall Street analysts, the board of directors and the major retailers. But they are not the ones whose "fur kids" are dying. Pet parents, as many call themselves, won't just down grade your stock. They want you in jail. You killed their fur kid, they will tell EVERYONE they know, until they trust you again...if ever.

3) Do the hard thing that will restore trust for the end user. The Tylenol story is bandied about as the gold standard of the right way to do things. J&J focused on restoring trust to the end user, based on their corporate value of safety, not "how to I keep the big retailers who buy truckloads happy?"

Don't think, "How do I minimize this for Wall Street so that the quarterlies will look good after the 25 million dollar write down for the recall.' Think, 'What will it take to convince the end user, whose pet is dead, to buy my food again?" When you answer THAT question then you will know what to do.

Companies ask, "What are blogs good for? " Most companies want to push to bloggers, to sell them stuff. They ask, "How do I get them to write good stuff about my products?"
Wrong question. Ask, "What are they saying about my company and product?" READ them for customer attitudes instead of figuring out how to sell stuff to people with blogs. What would you learn? Just how PISSED people are and, since your customers are smart, what they want you to do before they trust you again.

4) Bring in third party trusted testers. Not just "inspectors", TESTERS. People who actually analyze food. Then need to be independently funded and above reproach. Test EVERYTHING. Give them veto power over everything that goes into the food. For manufacturers the phase you are afraid of but you need? "They can stop the line."

5) Open up your records. Where does it comes from, what's in it? The cat's out of the bag (and he's not eating your food!) People now know about the Chinese connection, but do they know about the other dirty little secrets like rendering plants and what THEY put in the food? Dead, diseased, dying and down cattle are not good things to put in any food.
Now is the time to do this, or just wait until the mad cow strikes again, your choice.

6) Spend more on labeling than on marketing for 6 months.

7) Demand more of the FDA and the USDA and government regulators. Instead of screaming, "We can regulate ourselves!" Admit you have done a crummy job and say, "Please FDA, inspect us MORE. Here is MORE and FASTER access to our information. And here is the information about our suppliers. Here are our databases. This is NOT proprietary any more, you don't have to beg us for paperwork anymore." (I'm looking at you ConAgra).

8) Really communicate with your end users. The CEO and operations person should be on the phone talking to the folks whose pets have died. What do THEY want? What will it take to make they trust you again? If your communications people told you to do this and you didn't, listen to them now. If they didn't, get someone who understands how to keep your end users happy.

Lots of lawyers might have tried to help you minimize this. That ship has sailed, you need to go big with your story and THEN it will be minimized, but as we see from politics, it's often the attempts to cover up and down play a crisis that just makes it bigger.

I don't expect any companies to listen to or follow any of this advice. Why? Because right now they are listening to the "experts". The experts you need to hear from first are the people whose pets are sick or dead. Then trust your gut, if you have a heart you'll know what really needs to be done.

We hear you say, "We have pets too." But we don't hear what you would do if this happened to YOUR pet. What could you do to make your dead dog proud of you again? What would your dog, who you fed tainted food, ask of you to make it stop, so it never happened again? Your dog can't talk to you, but their guardians can. The parents of "fur kids" can tell you want they need.

What do I think? The company that goes big and demands testing, and welcomes regulation and opens up their books, will "win" this crisis. Everyone else might survive, but they will never come out of this like Johnson and Johnson did.

Who do you want to be like Mr. Pet Food CEO and Mr. Pet Food Brand Manager? Union Carbide after Bhopal or Johnson and Johnson after Tylenol? The choice is yours.

IHT Article: "Feed sellers in China routinely use protein substitute" Pulled?

For some reason the article below about melamime routinely being added to animal feed in China disappeared. I wrote them a letter to find out why. I'd call, but it's 5:00 AM in Hong Kong. Probably just a technical glitch because of heavy traffic. Just to help them out I've replicated the entire article below. Once they get more capacity up I'll snip it and link to it (don't want to violate any copyrights!)

April 29, 2:45 pm PDT, San Francisco

Press Relations, Asia/Pacific
International Herald Tribune
May-Ling Nam
1201 K Wah Centre
191 Java Road, North Point
Hong Kong

Press Relations, U.S.
Diane C McNulty
229 West 43rd Street
New York
NY 10036-3959
USA

Dear Ms. McNulty and Ms. Nam:

The article titled "Feed sellers in China routinely use protein substitute"

Is currently unavailable on your website.

By David Barboza and Alexei Barrionuevo
Published: April 29, 2007

Story at url:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/29/news/food.php?page=1
and http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/29/news/food.php?page=2

This has disappeared from the International Herald Tribune website as of 1:45 pm Pacific Daylight time in San Francisco. As of 2:45 pm PDT it is still off line. I have spoken to several colleagues around the United States and it is unavailable for them as well. This does not appear to be an isolated problem in my region.

Is there a problem with the story that is being corrected? Is there another source of this important story? There are many people that are very interested in a story about contaminated food being sold to the United States.

Please advise,
Sincerely,
Mr. Spocko

www.spockosbrain.com

For your identification purposes below is the text of the article:
Feed sellers in China routinely use protein substitute

The Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical factory in Zhangqiu, Shandong Province, which manufactures urea, melamine and melamine scrap (Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times)

By David Barboza and Alexei Barrionuevo
Published: April 29, 2007

ZHANGQIU, China: American food safety regulators trying to figure out how an industrial chemical called melamine contaminated so much pet food in the United States might come to this heavily polluted city in Shandong Province in the northern part of the country.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, small acorn-sized chunks of white rock, is then being sold to local entrepreneurs, who say they secretly mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to artificially enhance the protein level.

The melamine powder has been dubbed "fake protein" and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutrition value.

"It just saves money," says a manager at an animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level."

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

But now, melamine is at the center of a massive, multinational pet food recall after it was linked earlier this month to the deaths and injuries of thousands of cats and dogs in the United States and South Africa.

No one knows exactly how melamine - which had not been believed to be particularly toxic - became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.

U.S. regulators are now headed to China to figure out why pet food ingredients imported from here, including wheat gluten, were contaminated with high levels of the chemical.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has banned imports of wheat gluten from China and ordered the recall of over 60 million packages of pet food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also stepped in Thursday, ordering more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.

Scientists are now trying to determine whether melamine could be harmful to human health.

The huge pet food recall is raising questions in the United States about regulatory controls at a time when food supplies are increasingly being sourced globally. Some experts complain that the FDA is understaffed and underfunded, making it incapable of safeguarding America's food supply.

"They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. "Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional."

The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country's dubious food safety record and history of excessive antibiotic and pesticide use.

In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair, to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

China's government disputes any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But Friday, regulators here banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet it is clear from visiting this region of northern China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

Many animal feed operators advertise on the Internet seeking to purchase melamine scrap. And melamine scrap producers and traders said in recent interviews that they often sell to animal feed makers.

"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," says Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."

(Page 2 of 2)

Most local feed companies do not admit that they use melamine. But last Friday here in Zhangqiu, a fast-growing industrial city southeast of Beijing, a pair of animal feed producers explained in great detail how they purchase low-grade wheat, corn, soybean or other proteins and then mix in small portions of nitrogen-rich melamine, whose chemical properties give a bag of animal feed an inflated protein level under standard tests.

Melamine is the new scam of choice, they say, because urea - another nitrogen-rich chemical that works similarly - is illegal for use in pig and poultry feed and can be easily tested for in China as well as the United States.

"If you add it in small quantities, it won't hurt the animals," said one animal feed entrepreneur whose name is being withheld to protect him from prosecution.

The man - who works in a small animal feed operation that consists of a handful of storage and mixing areas - said he has mixed melamine into animal feed for years.

He said he was not currently using melamine, which is actually made from urea. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color.

Asked whether he could create an animal feed and melamine brew, he said yes, he has access to huge supplies of melamine. Using melamine-spiked pet food ingredient was not a problem, he said, even thought the product would be weak in protein.

"Pets are not like pigs or chickens," he said casually, explaining that cheating them on protein won't matter. "They don't need to grow fast."

The feed seller makes a heftier profit because the substitute melamine scrap is much cheaper than purchasing soy, wheat or corn protein.

"It's true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in," said a second animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. "Melamine will cost you about $1.20 per ton for each protein count whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference."

Few people outside of agriculture know about melamine here. The Chinese media, which is strictly censored, has not reported much about melamine or the pet food recall overseas. And no one in agriculture here seems to believe that melamine is particularly harmful to animals or pets in small doses.

A man named Jing, who works in the sales department at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group, said Friday that melamine scrap prices had been rising but he was not aware of how the company's product was being used.

"We have an auction for melamine scrap every three months," he said. "I haven't heard of it being added to animal feed. It's not for animal feed."

David Barboza reported from Zhangqiu and Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Chicago. Rujun Shen also contributed reporting.