Kathy, Please stay away from Blue Buffalo. Do your homework and you will see they are just BAD!! They even admitted to lying! http://iheartdogs.com/breaking-news-blue-buffalo-admits-to-lying-about-ingredients-here-is-why-you-should-care/
Eight years ago, thousands of dogs and cats died after being poisoned by tainted food. The world’s biggest pet food companies pulled more than 100 different products from store shelves. There’s still no official death toll from the Great Pet Food Recall, because the government doesn’t track animal deaths. But experts estimate at least 8,000 pets died.
For Blue , the carnage was an opportunity. In just five years, the company, which boasted of its “natural, healthy” products, had become one of the pet food industry’s most powerful players. Its rise was no small feat in a heavily concentrated industry — Mars Petcare and Nestle Purina together control about half of global sales, according to data from the trade publication Petfood Industry.
Blue Buffalo deployed a robust advertising budget to portray its products as more nutritious than those of its shoddy “big name” competitors — a term it has used frequently in commercials. As the recalls dominated headlines, Blue Buffalo ran a new ad campaign online and in newspapers, informing concerned consumers its products were a safe alternative to those that had been taken off the shelves.
For a while, the ads appeared to bolster the company’s image. But in late April — more than a month after its competitors had faced the music — Blue Buffalo acknowledged similar problems with one production run of its kitten food. A week later, the company expanded its recall to include all of its canned dog food, an entire line of canned cat food and treats it had marketed as “health bars.”
Blue Buffalo’s story is about more than one company’s advertising excess. It represents almost everything wrong with the pet food business, and just how little the industry and the government agencies that oversee it have changed since the most catastrophic pet food safety event in modern history. It’s a story with clear implications for human food safety, and serves as a warning for other sectors of the American economy where outgunned regulators are struggling to keep pace with global supply chains that grow more complex by the day.
