Deep Dog Doo Doo
One of our dogs is not aging well. She has been losing teeth, so we’ve switched her to wet dog food. We went with a “cuts and gravy” style of food, because it still looks mostly like the dry dog food we’ve given her. So far she’s taken to it with a kind of alacrity that she never displayed for dry dog food. Sure enough, just over a week after we start this, my mother-in-law calls us last night to warn us that CNN is reporting that there is a massive recall out on “cuts and gravy” style cat and dog foods. Sure enough, after checking things out on Iams’ helpful website, it turns out we’ve been feeding her poison (okay, not really poisonous, but apparently a lot of animals have suffered kidney failure and ten have died). For details on how to know if your Iams dog food is effected, check out this PDF.
What is super annoying is how inaccurate the CNN article is. As you can imagine with a recall this size, people are probably getting panicky and crazy, and the role of news organizations in these situations is to provide clear, precise information. CNN isn’t doing very well in this regard. Looking at their article, I thought we were in the clear, because our dog food brand wasn’t mentioned. Then I looked more closely.
Their “Recalled dog foods” section includes “Fine Feline Cat”. Unless the idea is to feed Felix to Fido, I suspect this is not a dog food brand name. So then I checked the list on Iams own site, and sure enough there was our food. A quick check of the product codes to confirm, and now we need to get some more dog food. Thanks CNN.
When my wife got to the pet store, she called me so I could check each brand name’s web site to see if they were effected by the recall, and sure enough, tons of brand names that weren’t in the CNN article are also effected and we found the products were still on Petco’s store shelves (specifically Science Diet has some cat food effected, although interestingly not their dog food).
The other fun aspect of this story is seeing this massive list of brand names. This is all pet foods from a single plant of a single company. We’re talking about a good forty brands of cat food and another forty odd brands of dog food. Talk about the illusion of choice! I’m sure there are variances between some of the brands, but keep in mind each brand in turn has at least a handful of distinct products. Do you really think there is a need for that many different kinds of pet food?
Apparently Menu Foods makes many of the brand-name pet foods (in particular the P&G ones) as well as house-brand pet foods of 17 of the top 20 North American retailers.
I seem to recall somewhere that a typical consumer’s brain will remember one or two brand names for a randomly chosen product category. For some specific areas of interest, they might know several more. Only someone who works in the business would possibly be able to handle 40+ brand names for something as trivial as pet food. So what is the point?
The point of course is to smother the market place with brand names, spending millions in marketing creating confusion, the illusion of choice and increasing the chances that the one or two brand names a customer might remember would eventually lead back to your pocket. The industry gets split between contract manufacturers and brand companies that for all intents and purposes are “Nike shoes” for the pet food industry.
The best thing about this is that this structure creates a Keiretsu-style structure that actually protects brand names from their inability to really be their own brand. In this case, there has been a common link with Menu Foods, but so many distinct brands have been impacted by it, it creates a notion that all brands have a problem, so no brand identity gets tarnished. Consumers freak out for a week, maybe two, and then everything goes back to normal.