Purina vs Blue Buffalo: Now the Results of this Year-Long Legal Battle Are Out, and it Appears that Purina is the Victor

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:

Fisher et al v. The Blue Buffalo Company, Ltd. et al, CaseNo. 14-cv-5937, C. D. CA.

Keil et al v. Blue Buffalo Company, Ltd., Case No.14-cv-880, E. D. MO.

Hutchison et al v. Blue Buffalo Company, Ltd., Case No.14-cv-1070, E. D. MO.

Andacky et al v. The Blue Buffalo Company, Ltd., Case No.14-cv-2938, E. D. NY.

For more information on Purina’s false advertising lawsuit against Blue Buffalo, visit petfoodhonesty.com.

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Purina Says Blue Buffalo Is 'Built on Lies': The Fighting Begins

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.

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Blue Buffalo is Getting Slammed by a Multitude of Lawsuits Alleging Deceptive Advertising Practices

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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Two Senators Are Urging the Food & Drug Administration to Open an Investigation into the Purina’s Beneful Brand Dog Food Allegations

A lawsuit filed in California claimed that thousands of dogs became ill or died after eating Purina’s Beneful kibble. Two senators are urging the Food & Drug Administration to open an investigation into the allegations.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, along with California Senator Dianne Feinstein, sent a letter [PDF] to the FDA calling for the agency to quickly investigate claims that Purina PetCare Company’s Beneful brand dry dog food contains toxins.

The senators also called for immediate updates on the implementation of FDA
requirements that could prevent such harmful contamination from occurring in pet foods.

In late February, it was revealed that a California man had filed a class action-seeking lawsuit against Purina saying the company’s dry dog food contains substances that are known to be toxic to animals and can lead to internal bleeding and other serious health issues for pets.

The man alleges that less than a month after beginning to exclusively feed his dogs Beneful dry kibble, all three became ill and his 8-year-old English Bulldog eventually died.

According to the lawsuit, illnesses experienced by thousands of dogs across the country were a result of toxins in Beneful such as, but not limited to, Propylene glycol and Mycotoxins.

Propylene glycol, the lawsuit states, is an automotive antifreeze component that is a known animal toxin. However, the substance is also an FDA-approved food additive for humans.

As for Mycotoxins, the lawsuit states they are a group of toxins produced by fungus that occurs in grains.

Representatives for Purina have said that the lawsuit was “without merit” and that the company would vigorously defend itself.

In their letter to the FDA, Durbin and Feinstein are asking for updates to the agency’s implementation of a 2007 law enacted to help prevent contaminated pet food from reaching animals.

Under the 2007 law, the FDA is required to ensure that pet food companies report to the agency within 24 hours of determining they have an adulterated product in their supply chain.

Additionally, the law requires the FDA to set ingredient and processing standards for pet food, strengthen labeling requirements, establish early warning systems for contaminated products and mandate that companies report contaminated food and make key records available during investigations.

“The components of the law that FDA has implemented are important to the public and veterinarians, namely the searchable online recall list posted on the agency’s website,” the letter states. “We appreciate that FDA has implemented an online database to inform consumers of pet food recalls. However, eight years later, most provisions of the pet food safety law have not been implemented and protections Congress enacted are not in place.” FOLLOW US!

Beneful Press Statement 2-25-2015: Frequently Asked Questions

Beneful is a high-quality, nutritious food enjoyed by millions of dogs everyday. Recently, Beneful has been the subject of class action lawsuits that contain baseless, unfounded allegations about our Beneful product. These allegations are simply untrue.

We continually work closely with the FDA to ensure the quality of every Purina product. We use only safe ingredients to ensure that all of our products meet or exceed FDA, USDA and AAFCO standards. In addition, our products are formulated by pet nutritionists, scientists and veterinarians to provide complete and balanced nutrition, and millions of healthy dogs eat Beneful each year.

As pet owners ourselves, our priority is the health and well-being of the millions of dogs who enjoy Beneful. We take these allegations very seriously and stand by our product, which is backed by Purina's strict quality controls and comprehensive food safety program.

Unfortunately, class action suits are common these days. They are not indicative of a product issue. In fact, we've faced two such suits in the past with similar allegations. Both were found to be baseless and were subsequently dismissed by the courts.

Adding to the confusion, social media outlets can be a source of false or incomplete information, as many other pet food brands have experienced themselves.

We at Beneful want you, our valued customers, to know that this lawsuit is baseless; you can continue to feel confident feeding your dogs our food. We stand committed to our Brand, our products and your pets.

We encourage you to reach out to us at any time with any questions at 1–888-236-3385. Or, visit https://www.beneful.com/our-people to get a behind the scenes look into how the Purina Nutrition Research team evaluates the safety and ingredients of Beneful dog food.

More >>>

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The FDA Issued a Warning Letter to a Purina Pet Food Canning Facility Finding 'Significant Deviations' from Pet Food Regulations

The FDA issued a Warning Letter to a Purina Pet Food canning facility finding 'significant deviations' from pet food regulations. Though no recalls have been issued, FDA had serious concerns about this pet food plant.

The FDA Warning Letter stated their inspection lasted for two weeks – from September 15, 2014 through October 1, 2014. Inspection revealed “that your facility has significant deviations from the LACF (low-acid can food) regulations.”

The inspection found that this Purina plant deviated from the required processing of the pet food – and further did not document the deviation (as required by law). The FDA Warning Letter stated “your firm did not provide documentation associated with the evaluation of the entire lot of product affected by the process deviation and did not provide documentation and/or the specifics of your corrective action plan in order to ensure that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.”

FDA also found temperature drop concerns with the pet food manufactured at this plant. Law requires canned pet food to be heated to specific temperatures and any variations of these required temperatures are required to be noted in a log. This Purina plant did not document the drop in temperatures.

FDA “observed” that the conveyor system in this plant did “not have adequate protection in place to prevent an unprocessed can” from ultimately reaching the consumer. An ‘unprocessed can’ of pet food would be an uncooked can of pet food – uncooked can of feed grade ingredients that could be full of dangerous bacteria. Purina responded to FDA they are in the process of correcting this issue, however FDA stated “We do not consider this response acceptable because you did not provide specifics of your corrective action plan in order to INSURE that your firm will prevent these occurrences in the future.”

The public FDA Warning Letter to Purina  – posted on the FDA website – does not provide lot numbers of products involved. The only information consumers have is product names – listed below. All of these products are canned/moist foods.

Alpo PRIME Cuts with Beef
Alpo Chop House Originals Filet Mignon
Alpo Chop House Originals roasted Chicken
Friskies Mariner’s Catch
Friskies Mixed Grill
Friskies Gravy Sensations with Turkey and Giblets
Friskies Supreme Supper
Friskies Indoor Chicken
Friskies Salmon Dinner
Mighty Dog Chicken Egg & Bacon Country Platter
Mighty Dog Chop House Originals Filet Mignon
Mighty Dog Lamb and Rice
ProPlan Senior Beef and Rice Entrée

If you are feeding your pet one of these products – please pay close attention to your pet’s health. Should any illness occur, notify your veterinarian first, the FDA second.

You can report a pet illness to the FDA here: http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/SafetyHealth/ReportaProblem/ucm182403.htm

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Dog's Touching Love Letter To Owners Who Abandoned Him Will Change How You See Strays

If a homeless dog could write a letter to the people who left him on the side of the road, what would he say?

"Never Say Goodbye," a poignant Purina-sponsored short film, imagines the answer. It follows an abandoned shiba inu as he tries to find his way back to the family he loved so dearly and struggles to come to terms with the fact that they might not want him anymore.

To read more on this story, click here: Dog's Touching Love Letter To Owners

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