Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Pet Food Scare Gets Uglier
by
A Monday ABC News story said the Menu Foods pet food contamination may have “sickened or killed 39,000 pets.” And a CNN story this morning said the recall of pet food was being expanded to include products made at a Canadian factory. Even though Menu Foods is a Canadian company, all the previously recalled products had been limited to pet foods produced at the company’s plants in New Jersey and Kansas.
The expanded recall affects some products made by Royal Canin Canada. The story quotes Royal Canin Canada’s CEO, “After being repeatedly reassured by Menu Foods, as reinforced by FDA public statements, that none of the contaminated wheat gluten had made its way to Canada, we were completely shocked to learn yesterday that this was not the case.”
Besides being a tragedy for many pet owners, this has the makings of being a colossal PR and marketing disaster. It will soon be a month since this story broke on March 16 (see our previous post), and to keep getting “surprising” new information like this at such a late date points to company ineptitude at best. I went to the Menu Foods site this morning to look for additional information, but it wouldn’t load (too many frightened pet owners looking for info I assume). They have had this problem off and on since the story broke, and to not have fixed it by now is just plain inexcusable. In addition, the title of the site—featuring a photo of the cute puppies above—is the Menu Foods Income Fund, which makes no sense. It sounds like a mutual fund.
According to this story by BL Ochman, a couple of weeks ago Menu Foods retained a professional PR person to help with this issue: “Sam Bornstein, a veteran public affairs exec for National (PR) in Toronto and sister firm Cohn & Wolfe/Canada, is handling the Menu Foods account.” They have their work cut of for them. In the last two weeks, I haven’t seen the hands of a professional PR firm evident anywhere.
In addition, if you do a Google search for Menu Foods, two out of the four paid ads that come up (top and/or right side) are from law firms already involved in class action lawsuits. Not good. As is often the case, these class action lawsuits will probably be of little or no benefit to individual pet owners that have been affected.
Have you noticed all the new pet food ads online and on TV that are promoting pet foods made with natural ingredients and no wheat gluten. They are everywhere. No one can say there aren’t some marketing opportunists out there. It also stands to reason that any product that now contains wheat gluten, and has to disclose it as such, is about to find a substitute or suffer the consumer consequences. Goodbye wheat gluten industry.
In PR it is so important to get out ahead of these issues. This is one of those stories where it seems the information has come out of the blocks too late and has been running behind ever since. That’s too bad for many pets, pet owners and many other companies and people that will be affected by the repercussions.
