When are you going to buy dog ​​food?

You may be surprised who has been making and selling your dog food. Once upon a time, a pet food company was a pet food company, not a handy division that made profit from byproducts and waste from manufacturing other products under its ticker symbol.

Two of the most visible pet food manufacturers stand out as examples: Ralston Purina was sold to British Petroleum in 1986, to the Sterling Group in 1993, then acquired by Koch Industries in 1996 and is now a subsidiary of the Nestlé corporation. Waltham, a name that includes Pedigree, Nutro, Royal Canin and Cesar among its pet food catalogue, is owned by giant Mars Corporation. Mars was already the world’s largest dog food packer in 1968, when it acquired KalKan. Oh, and by the way, the Banfield veterinary hospital chain, the Pet Hospital, which operates clinics in many PetSmart stores, is now partially owned by Mars, Inc., since 2007 when the CEO sold his shares.

On the FundingUniverse site, Ralston Purina’s company perspective statement reads:

“Purina Mills’ corporate philosophy is to continue our tradition of providing both the necessary nutritional products and the value-added services that growers, processors and retailers need to meet the demands of a growing end-consumer market. We remain committed to expanding our research and development to enable American agricultural entrepreneurs to take advantage of the opportunities that lie ahead.

I don’t see anything there to take care of the consumer and deliver a safe, quality product…

So what do these mergers, acquisitions and subsidiaries mean to you? To your dog?

One of the areas with the greatest impact is marketing.

Consider all those Beneful ads on TV. “You just think you’re pampering yourself…” Well, that’s true. Every sponsorship from Pedigree to Eukanuba to Iams was included in every major canine sporting event; The inferences that “Top Breeders Recommend” are the power of marketing dollars. Stop and think about how many bags of dog food and packs of treats must be sold to pay for Westminster’s Pedigree sponsorship or Eukanuba’s AKC National Championship. By the year 2000, Mars, Inc. was spending more than $850 million a year advertising its brands. That’s a lot of kibble and bites to sell for those companies, and others like them, to keep delivering gravy trains.

But none of those ads give you concrete good reasons why you should feed their products to your pet. They don’t talk about protein sources or give you real information about digestibility. They show you a witty Border Collie or a chubby puppy rummaging through a bowl of his food like he hasn’t seen food in a week, or a Golden Retriever puppy, when a high-profile movie coincidentally comes on. Based on a best-selling book about a Golden Retriever: He breaks open a bag of kibble, then devours it as fast as he can. Ads give you the “Awwww” factor, what they don’t give you is the “Ewwww” factor. That is why it is so important to learn to understand what is on the label, and will be described as obscurely as legal regulations allow, for example*:

Eukanuba, First Dozen Ingredients: Chicken, chicken by-product meal (ground, parts removed from carcass, i.e. necks, feet, undeveloped eggs, intestines, etc.), cornmeal, ground whole sorghum (from low digestibility), whole ground barley grain meal, chicken fat, fish meal (whole dried ground tissue or fish cuts from unspecified fish sources), brewer’s rice (ground rice grain fragments), natural chicken flavor , Dried beet pulp (sugar beet residues removed during sugar manufacturing), , Dried egg product (obtained from egg breaking operations, hatchery operations, egg graders, etc., frozen, dried or liquid) , dried brewer’s yeast (by-product of brewing or brewing).

But wait! It gets more interesting!

Pedigree “Complete Nutrition”: Whole Ground Corn, Meat Meal/Meat and Bone Meal (referred to as the “product” of non-specified mammalian tissues, with or without bone, excluding hair, hoof horns, manure, etc., except in such amounts as may unavoidably occur under good processing practices), corn gluten meal, animal fat (obtained from non-specified mammals and/or poultry), ground wheat/flour, ground wheat, natural poultry flavor , wheat flour, salt, potassium chloride, caramel color, vegetable oil.

Where’s the meat? Oh wait, that was another catchy ad campaign…

*Information in parentheses not included in the packaging.