After the massive pet food recalls of 2007, people hoped never to hear about a recall again. But recalls happen. Are recalls handled differently now? How are individual pet food companies getting the information out to their distributors, retailers, and consumers? Learn what an online pet food retailer has to say about how two pet food more recent recalls were handled by manufacturers.

People have had plenty to say about recalls on the Veterinary Medicine blog and the Readers Respond sections of this site.

These comments come from viewers who lost pets to tainted foods or dealt with pets ill from eating these foods. In this interview, hear from Anthony Holloway, CEO of K9Cuisine.com, a large online vendor of premium dog and cat foods. He recently had to deal with a couple of food recalls as a vendor, and details his experiences here.

Veterinary Medicine Guide: Please share your opinions about pet food recalls.

Anthony Holloway: Lets face it. Recalls stink. They are never good. Pets are at risk. Pet owners are naturally anxious. They want to know if the foods they are feeding are affected and if so they want to know what do. After the massive and tragic recalls in 2007 pet owners are naturally suspicious. They were lead to believe they were doing the best for their pet.

Nature's Variety and Wysong have each had recent recalls. Both brands are considered super premium foods. Both have very loyal and passionate customers. These two companies responses to bad news is an interesting comparison in how differently companies respond to bad news.

Veterinary Medicine Guide: How should pet food companies handle "bad news" and specifically, a recall situation?

Anthony Holloway: I would like to share a couple recent examples of how two different premium pet food manufacturers handled recalls of their food.

Nature's Variety
On Thursday February 11, 2010, Nature's Variety announced a recall on their raw chicken & turkey diets. The details of the recall and statement by the Nature's Variety CEO can be found here. Within minutes of the announcements, our company was contacted by our Nature's Variety representative. We were told that there was a recall, gave us the details, answered our questions, told how the company would handle affected product and probably most important where customers could get answers.

A short time later, we were called by our regional Nature's Variety representative. We then received an email from Nature's Variety detailing their response. Later in the day we also received calls from the distributor where we purchase Nature's Variety food. In every instance, we were told the details and were assured that pets were their first and foremost concern.

In addition to all of the phone and email followups, the Nature's Variety web site has the recall announcement front and center. You can not miss it. There are also links on the home page to the details and a letter from the CEO.

Wysong Recall
Let's compare this to the recent Wysong recall. I discovered Wysong had a recall from the buzz on the internet. At first, I thought it was just rumor because when I went to the Wysong website there was no apparent mention of the recall mentioned.

I called the company, but did not get an answer. It was not until I did a Google search of the Wysong site that I found a very brief mention of a recall. It provided very little detail other than there was a recall related to mold. I tried backtracking on the site and could not find any apparent way to navigate to the notice.

I later figured out the notice could be found by clicking on a link that was on the product detail page of the recalled product. Unless you were buying this product from the Wysong website, you would not have found any mention of a recall.

In short, the information was buried. I tried calling the company. Initially there was no answer. When I did get through their response was very defensive. They provided no additional information other than direct me to the notice on their website. They claimed they were busy alerting customers and all the necessary contacts were made. They went on to say further notification was not warranted and it would only unnecessarily alarm customers that were not affected by the recall.

I personally found that very interesting since we sell Wysong and our company had not been contacted. We purchase Wysong from three different distributors. We inquired with each distributor about the recall. When we contacted the distributors they stated this was the first they had heard of a recall.

In all fairness, Wysong may have a quality control system that tracks all sales by lot number. They may know where the specific lots were sold and to what distributor. It could be that Wysong knew there was no way K9 Cuisine had any of the affected product. Therefore there was no reason to contact us or our distributors. However they did not communicate anything more than was in the statement on their site.

Thank you for sharing your experiences, Anthony.

What do you think?
What is the best way for a pet food company to respond to a recall? Should just the distributors and retailers be notified so they can in turn return the food or notify the retail customer, or should the information be "out there" for everyone to check and verify that their food is safe?