Natural companions

31 May 2017

With the humanization of pets comes the humanization of pet food. Food for pets is becoming as safe and wholesome as ours.

Humanization

Not that long ago, raw materials for pet food came from off-cuts, rejects, and scrapings off the factory floor. No longer. Pet food manufacturing, in terms of ingredients, safety and automated equipment, is approaching food manufacturing methods and standards for humans.

A main driver is 95% of pet owners who, according to Nielsen, consider their furry friends to be part of the family, up 7% from 2007. In some circles, pet owners are actually referring to themselves as pet ‘parents’. They want their four-legged charges, like their kids, to be safe, happy, and most of all healthy and well-nourished.

With the humanization of pets comes the humanization of pet food. The gap between their food and ours continues to narrow. As with us, many pet owners are saying no to GMOs. They want wholesome ingredients, and expect that in food containing chicken, for instance, ingredients come from birds that roam free and that the farmers who produce them, use grains, vegetables and other raw materials, and apply sustainable farming methods.

They want transparency in regard to where the food comes from and where it is produced. They want to know specific nutritional information from clear and honest labelling. But most of all they want to know their pet food is safe.

Regulations

FDA has responded, according to Steven Blackowiak, Director of Food Safety and Research at Bühler Aeroglide, a major food equipment producer in Cary, NC. He points out that FSMA now expects pet food to follow the food industry with the same focus on hazard analysis, preventive controls, production and monitoring procedures, corrective actions, verification and record-keeping. “Updates to rules are all trending toward a standardized, more strictly regulated environment, and as food regulations get applied to pet food, the needs for processing equipment will be similar,” he says.

This means that the increasing humanization of pet foods is driving advancements in the design and choice of production machinery used to produce them, in the quality, safety, and traceability of ingredients they are made from, and in regulations producers must now follow to manufacture them, including HACCP, TACCP, and VACCP.

Food fraud

HACCP, TACCP, and VACCP are all part of a Food Safety Management System that falls under the overall Food Fraud umbrella developed by GFSI. HACCP, as everyone knows, is all about food safety, preventing unintentional, accidental adulterations and infections. TACCP is focused on food defense, preventing intentional criminal adulterations, including product tampering and poisonings (think Tylenol). VACCP, on the other hand, is about food fraud driven by economic gain. Examples include mislabelling of foods (turbo for cod for instance), the horsemeat scandal that occurred in Europe not long ago, and countless others. Pet foods are vulnerable to all three, and are now expected to be protected by the same production and monitoring controls as human foods.

Leading by example

Champion Petfoods LP of Edmonton, Alberta, is setting a benchmark. The company began in 1965 and has since spread its products and philosophy to countries across North America and the world. “There are many important key areas where pet food safety practices are moving more in line with human food safety, specifically in the U.S. under the FDA FSMA Animal Food Rule,” says Champion President and CEO Frank Burday. “This requires practices such as supplier and ingredient verification, validation of critical manufacturing processes, enhancement of good manufacturing practices, establishment of preventive control-based food safety plans, finished products and environmental monitoring programme validation, food safety crisis management, and recall plan simulations.”

He says that the area where the pet food industry has advanced its food safety mandate is in line with human food to control risks associated with nutritional deficiencies and toxicities specific to different pets and their respective life stages.

At risk

Mitchell Weinberg, President and CEO of Instatech Inc. of New York, NY, a company known for their expertise on food fraud, says pet food is far more at risk than human food, mainly because pets aren’t regarded as important as their owners. “The industry has to be more vigilant where they are sourcing. The industry has to be really careful on where food is being documented and traced, or we’re going to be having greater problems, not only with pet food, but also with human food,” he notes.

“Our food source is at risk, and that is human food as well as pet food, because of economically motivated adulteration. My feeling is that we are one catastrophic event away from how dangerous this situation is. If the food industry continues to source from questionable sources from cheaper locations around the world, without validating what’s happening and investigating, it’s dangerous.”