Blue Buffalo Company has voluntarily recalled Kitty Yums
Chicken Recipe Cat Treats because they contain propylene glycol, a solvent not
approved for pet food, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA).
The treats were sold in 2 oz., plastic stand up pouches.
Only these specific code dates of this product are involved:
Blue Kitty Yums Tasty Chicken Recipe, UPC: 859610007820 -
Best If Used By: April 24, 2016.
Blue Kitty Yums Tasty Chicken Recipe, UPC: 859610007820 -
Best If Used By: July 24, 2016.
No other pet foods or treats are affected by the recall.
A year ago, pet owners watched as Purina and Blue Buffalo,
two pet food manufactures, slapped each other with lawsuits. Purina sued Blue
Buffalo for false advertising, claiming the contents of their food was not
accurately reflected on their packaging – that they did not disclose the
presence of poultry by-product on their label. Blue Buffalo responded with a
counter suit, saying that Purina was engaging in a smear campaign and defaming
the brand.
Well, now the truth is out.
Here’s a news story covering the controversy when the cases were filed a
year ago:
Now the results of this year-long legal battle are out, and
it appears that Purina is the victor.
According to Nestlé Purina PetCare, Blue Buffalo admitted
that “’substantial’ and ‘material’ portion of Blue Buffalo pet food sold to
consumers contained poultry by-product meal, despite pervasive advertising
claims to the contrary.”
The claims that the pet food was free from poultry
by-product meal, corn, or grain often came at a higher cost to consumers who
were led to believe they were making an informed choice regarding what their
animals were consuming.
“Only when faced with undeniable evidence from the lawsuit
has Blue Buffalo admitted the truth to the court: a ‘substantial’ and
‘material’ portion of Blue Buffalo pet food sold over the past several years
contained poultry by-product meal. It is unclear to us if or when this practice
stopped, or whether any Blue Buffalo pet food containing by-product meal is
still on store shelves,” said Keith Schopp, a spokesperson for Nestlé Purina
Petcare.
As news spreads about Blue Buffalo’s misleading claims and
false advertising, a number of class action lawsuits have sprung up around the
nation. Poisonedpets.com recently compiled a list of the current lawsuits.
Click on the case for more information:
At the executive offices of Blue Buffalo, in Wilton, Conn., Labradors and golden retrievers wander the halls, nosing around for lunch leftovers, and members of William Bishop’s 300-person workforce all call the 75-year-old founder and chairman Bill. A basketball and lacrosse player at Ohio-Wesleyan University in the late 1950s, Bishop, 6-foot-5, walks with a slight slouch but retains the loping gait of a college jock. His white hair thinning, he wears an open purple shirt over a black tee, blue jeans, a cloth belt decorated with skulls and crossbones, and running shoes the size of rowboats. He notes proudly that his sons, Billy and Chris, have senior executive jobs, making “the Buff,” as he calls the company, “a real family operation.”
Started in 2002 and propelled by advertising techniques the elder Bishop honed hawking Kool-Aid, Tang, and later SoBe, a beverage company he co-founded in the 1990s, Blue Buffalo last year tallied $1 billion in sales, making it America’s fastest-growing major purveyor of dog and cat food and the largest specializing in the all-natural kibble niche. He named his latest company in memory of Blue, a beloved family Airedale. The Buffalo part reflects his affection for cowboys, Indians, and Western kitsch. “Also it’s good to have a strong icon that people will remember,” he explains. “SoBe had the lizard. The Buff has the American buffalo.” Undercutting the Great Plains motif, orange-labeled bottles of Veuve Clicquot Champagne line shelves outside Bishop’s corner office. “You have to like to drink to work here,” he jokes. “We’ve had a lot to celebrate.” The company’s rise can be measured not only by its near-ubiquitous retail presence but by pervasive advertising that Bishop boasts is deliberately “in-your-face,” and encourages “pet parents” to compare the Buff to the competition. Blue Buffalo’s television spots and Internet videos have become so familiar they’ve been parodied on Saturday Night Live. The mock commercial for “Blue River” dog food aired on NBC in April. Guest host Seth Rogen and SNL cast member Cecily Strong played the sort of overwrought consumers who philosophize about pet nutrition in Blue Buffalo’s actual ads. The characters suffer an emotional meltdown as they discuss what they’ve fed their bug-eyed pug mix, Peanut. Purina is notably not amused. The St. Louis-based company, owned by the Swiss conglomerate Nestlé (NESN:VX), has manufactured feed and animal chow for 120 years. It controls about a third of the $20 billion-a-year pet food market but lately has seen customers lured away by such premium brands as Hill’s, Merrick, and Blue Buffalo. Competition is one thing, but executives at Purina headquarters say they can’t abide Bishop’s advertising, which they claim is misleading. Contrary to its carefully cultivated reputation for authenticity, Blue Buffalo “is built on lies,” alleges Steven Crimmins, Purina’s normally even-tempered chief marketing officer for U.S. pet food. Although Bishop stresses his company is family run, “they’re owned by a big Wall Street firm [and] outsource all their manufacturing,” Crimmins says, not trying to disguise his indignation. “Their key ingredient claims aren’t true, and they have a history of exaggerating what their products do.” In May, Purina sued Blue Buffalo in federal court in St. Louis for false advertising, commercial disparagement, and unjust enrichment. Bishop’s lawyers fired back with equally heated counterclaims about an unlawful Purina “smear campaign” seeking “to stem the exodus of Nestlé Purina customers to Blue Buffalo.” In a taunting open letter posted on his company’s website, Bishop accused the larger company of relying on “voodoo science” when it cited in its court papers lab tests supposedly showing that Blue Buffalo used poultry byproduct meal—an ingredient Bishop’s company promises “never” to include. Purina v. Blue Buffalo has riveted vets, retailers, and everyone who follows the expanding market for fancy pet eats, says Jennifer Larsen, an assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of California at Davis veterinary school. “The emotional appeals to treat dogs and cats like human children have gone to an extreme,” she adds. “This case shows how far the manufacturers are willing to go to try to persuade consumers they’re right and the other guys are making it up.” At a more basic level, the litigation illuminates the success of Bill Bishop, a classic ad guy who unapologetically cashes in on the market’s latest whims—human, canine, or other. Setting aside the merits of poultry byproduct meal (to which we’ll return), one can’t help but speculate that the wily Bishop has lured Purina into a fight where attention is the real prize.
Before sweetened beverages and pet food, Bishop first had to sell himself. Just out of the U.S. Marines in 1962, he took the commuter train from Westchester County, N.Y., to Grand Central Terminal. Armed with a roll of dimes, he stood at a pay phone in the lobby of the old Pan Am Building, cold calling ad agencies in hopes of landing a job interview. BBDO said yes, he could come in for a tryout.
Nestlé Purina PetCare Company (Purina) aren’t the only people suing Blue Buffalo, now consumers have jumped on the litigation bandwagon and Blue Buffalo is getting slammed by a multitude of lawsuits alleging deceptive advertising practices. The growing number of lawsuits filed against Blue Buffalo keep growing and they are claiming, among other things, that the company falsely represented that their pet food does not contain ingredients – such as chicken/poultry by-product meals and corn – when it appears as if Blue Buffalo’s pet food might actually contain those ingredients. Because of the number of class action lawsuits involved the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation has agreed to consolidate seven false advertising class action lawsuits filed against Blue Buffalo Co. Ltd. for misleading customers about the ingredients in its pet food. They alleged that Blue Buffalo misled its customers by claiming its pet food products did not contain any chicken by-products, corn or grain and led them to pay premium prices for the pet food. The class-action lawsuit was transferred to another court where several related lawsuits making the same allegations will be heard together. The smoking e-mails It is safe to assume that Blue Buffalo was aware, at some point, that their pet food did contain the vilified ingredient they based their marketing claim on, when during pretrial discovery—the process by which litigants demand internal documents and communications that could become evidence—e-mails revealed that Purina claims reinforce its allegations. In May, e-mails between a Blue Buffalo ingredient broker (Diversified Ingredients) and a major supplier (Wilbur-Ellis) suggest strongly that they did indeed sell pet food containing by-product meal. In an e-mail to Diversified Ingredients, a broker working for Blue Buffalo, a sales manager for supplier Wilbur-Ellis wrote that it did include “some by-product meal” in shipments from a Texas plant intended for Blue Buffalo. Realizing that the inclusion of by-product meal now has potential legal consequences, Diversified Ingredients expressed alarm to Wilbur-Ellis and a way to respond to the kibble crisis: “I think if we work together, we can band-aid this situation,” Diversified’s Collin McAtee wrote on May 15 to Darwin Rusu of Wilbur-Ellis. Referring to a “smoking gun,” McAtee added, “If you are going to fill these contracts for any reason, then I’m going to have to go to Blue Buffalo to address the breach of contract and undoubtedly divulge the details of what was shipped and the possibility that Rosser’s material is the smoking gun for their problems. That I do not want to do. If the finger is pointed in that direction and then later verified to have been the cause, then Diversified and Wilbur will both have to answer to this in litigation with Blue. The liabilities in this could be enormous. You are talking about massive product recalls, potential market share loss, etc. That would undoubtedly be in the several million dollar range.” Blue Buffalo then claimed they were duped by their supplier, by publicly revealing that contrary to prior assurances, Blue Buffalo admitted that ingredients from their supplier did in fact contain poultry by-product meal after all — proving that the central allegations in Purina’s false advertising lawsuit against them. Despite Blue Buffalo’s admission, no mention was made about taking steps to recall the mislabeled pet foods, nor to compensate the millions of consumers that purchased the falsely labeled products.
Purina claims that testing of Blue Buffalo’s pet food were conducted in a “highly sophisticated, independent lab“, while Blue Buffalo calls their testing “junk science” and claims the testing was performed with a rudimentary microscope under less than optimal conditions with questionable methods. Regardless, the results of testing and analysis reveal that, in some instances, 9 out of 10 Blue Buffalo products tested contained poultry by-product meal, even though the packaging indicated otherwise. Instead, tests indicated the products contained several signature elements of poultry by-product meal: eggshell, raw feather and leg scale. Further, that quantities of grain were found in samples of Blue Buffalo’s pet food that were labeled “grain-free.”
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