Pet food and pseudo-variety
The spotlight this week was on an obscure Canada-based company called Menu Foods, which makes over 1 billion cans of pet food a year, for sale by other North American companies. It appears that some contaminated canned and pouched dog and cat food has been released, and the company has started a recall on many varieties. A sad story, but it happens to the best and the worst of companies, and Menu Foods has at least reacted quickly.
But the interesting thing for us is the list of brands produced by Menu Foods. The company makes 42 different brands of cat food and 61 brands of dog food. That's not SKUs, but brands - each of the brands has a large number of flavor varieties.
The list of brands is breathtaking. Some are store brands for all the US's major and minor supermarket chains (Food Lion, Wegman's, Winn Dixie, Publix, Safeway, Kroger's, Hannaford [no relation to the author of this blog), even Ol' Roy sold by Wal-Mart). Some others are lesser-known general varieties: Cadillac, Award, and Big Red. Still others are so-called "nutritional" pet foods, premium high-cost brands like Iams, Eukanuba, Nutro, Nutriplan, and Science Diet (this last one not on the recall list).
Iams and Eukanuba are Procter & Gamble brands, it turns out, but who knew they didn't make their one pet food? Or that their expensive foods were made in the same factories (the same vats?) as bargain brands.
Pseudo-variety describes the way in which a highly concentrated industry using similar methods can produce a dazzling array of "choices" at every price point and quality level. It's hard enough to do food shopping for yourself, let alone choosing between Nutro Natural Choice Turkey Giblets (pouch version) or Price Chopper Beef with Gravy (can), among the thousands of SKUs on the market. It's not hard to believe that the same ingredients and perhaps the same recipes were used for all of these pet food brands, from the cheapest to the most expensive. If I were paying extra bucks for the Nutro or Eukanuba brands under the impression that I was getting a specially prepared, boutique brand, I'd be asking myself some serious questions.
(Full disclosure: My dear yellow Lab, the long-departed Rufus, ate a combination of food scraps and kibble, whatever was on sale. I looked at the Iams, but couldn't see the point of spending more.)
(Thanks to reader Satyen Sarhad who also noted this angle and suggested I write about it just as I was preparing to do so.)
