COMMENTARY – Procter & Gamble Stumbles with Pet Food Recall
Issue: Consumers learn that expensive and store brand pet-food are not very different
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri
One of the most disturbing aspects of the national pet food recall is the illusion of superiority it has shattered for buyers of expensive pet-foods. Processor Menu Foods not only makes store brand petfood for stores as diverse as Wal-Mart, Winn-Dixie and Wegmans but also premium brand pet-foods including two Procter & Gamble brands, Iams and Eukanuba. In all, 53 brands of dogfood and 42 brands of catfood are affected.
Why is this so disturbing to consumers? Not just because Fluffy or Sparky might die from kidney failure. The other bad news from the consumer point of view is that the premium food that they have been lovingly feeding to these extended family members is no different from generic store brands.
How did this happen? A combination of greed and laziness was to blame. For much of the petfood industry, co-packaging (or producing generic products using a third party manufacturer alongside branded products with identical ingredients and a higher pricepoint) has been a fact of life for years. This is greed plain and simple, and the brands engaging in this practice surely deserve the fate they will experience
Procter & Gamble is a slightly different case, however. AdAge quotes a Procter & Gamble spokesperson as noting that “Iams and Eukanuba dry products are not manufactured at Menu Foods and are not affected by this recall. Only a small portion of our wet canned and foil-pouch products for dogs and cats are affected by this recall.”
Iams was popularized by Clay Mathile who purchased the company from its founder in 1970. The brand was sold through veterinarians who promoted it as a scientific solution to pet diets. This vastly increased the strength and credibility of the brand, so much so that it attracted the attention of Procter & Gamble, who purchased Iams in 1999.
The Iams brand survives on the belief that it is the best brand for pet health and further bolstered by the P&G introduction of Eukanuba, which is sold through veterinarians.
All of this has been endangered by the news that the brands are co-packaged with generic pet foods. The question is, why did Procter & Gamble, one of the worlds pre-eminent brand companies, allow this to happen?
Most likely, a brand manager recommended that a wet-food line extension for Iams and Eukanuba be subcontracted out to Menu Foods to spare cost and manufacturing complexity. Nobody watching the brand asked the question – is this manufacturing practice consistent with our brand promise for these premium pet-foods? And now, even though the majority of Iams and Eukanuba branded products were not packaged by Menu Foods, they are going to be tarnished by the same brush.
March 21st, 2007 at 6:20 pm
[...] An NYU marketing professor offers his thoughts on the “illusion of security” that the food recall has “shattered for buyers of expensive pet-foods.” [...]
May 15th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
To quote that great motion picture classic "Tommy Boy": "What the American Public doesn't know is what makes it the American Public". And as Steve Martin said in "LA Story": "Love isn't the truth, but it's what ought to be true."
My personal experience is with lamp marketing. I can attest that in the past decade, the quality of manufacture associated with premium names like Kichler/GenLyte and Stiffel has gone from impeccable to implausible . The factory-order Kichlers are still robust workpieces with steel weldments, brass castings and aerospace-grade wiring. But retail Kichler is largely outsourced, licensed or subcontracted, built with diepunched steel nuts on poorly seamed 1/8npt-32 tube, often failing to stand straight or assemble tightly when pulled from the box. See a Stiffel for sale? If it's new it's fake, the company went out of business six years ago and Norelco bought the name. They've experimented with making brass lamps in the grand style, but often content themselves with whitemetal and brassplate replicas ballasted with concrete — fodder for dumpsters.
It's this temptation to stretch the premium brand to cover discount/retail that tells us, item one, that Americans live more poorly than we did twenty years ago. We expect the same amenities we could afford then and often labor under the illusion that by shopping the same brand we're getting equivalent goods. It's what ought to be true, right? But increasingly the rule is that if you
can afford something without going into debt, you're buying an inferior copy. Only the upper middle class can afford actual goods and their distribution channel is increasingly decoupled from the sweaty masses (Mention "William Sonoma" to most Americans and they draw a blank. Everyone still knows "Sears" though).
The danger is that marketing decisions are made by . . . the upper middle class. They increasingly send their brands on a cost-factoring powerdive chasing formerly middle-class customers past the poverty line, having no daily experience with buying these inferior goods hence no groundtruth on what the powerdive is doing to the brand. At some point we're just going to have to admit that America is a shell of its former glory and try to rebuild something from that shell. Until then we'll keep finding Chinese wallpaper paste in our dogfood and concrete in our Stiffels.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:29 am
"How did this happen? A combination of greed and laziness was to blame. For much of the petfood industry, co-packaging (or producing generic products using a third party manufacturer alongside branded products with identical ingredients and a higher pricepoint) has been a fact of life for years. This is greed plain and simple, and the brands engaging in this practice surely deserve the fate they will experience."
Sadly, I agree with you on this. What's worse is we even trust that these are healthy dog food. Pet food recalls are also very disturbing because it goes to prove that you can never be too sure with anything you buy on the supermarkets or stores these days. They tell you it is safe and healthy one day only to find out a couple of months after as poisonous or can cause cancer.
July 6th, 2010 at 4:28 am
Making some fat cat chemical company rich at the risk of our pets who trust us. Dogs and cat are carnivores, they don’t need carrots, rice, grains and the like ! They need raw meat and bones! Stuff that they’d get if they were in the wild. No matter what they may look like they’re all just Lions tiger and wolves, oh my !