Whoever dreamed that wheat gluten adulterated with the chemical melamine, which is normally used in plastic and fertilizer, could find its way from China into leading North American pet food brands?
It’s a story that gripped pet owners this spring but also has big implications for the human food industry, according to Peter Kaufman, a rising star in the pet food world.
“Much of what happens in the pet industry is a mirror of what happens in the human food industry, particularly on how ingredients are sourced and manufactured, and I think that’s the case here,” said the 37-year-old founder of Apperon, Inc., a Toronto company with more than $1 million in annual sales in animal nutrition supplements and pet snacks.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
Kaufman calls his products “human snacks disguised as pet treats.” He uses only food-quality, U.S. Department of Agriculture graded sirloin and chicken, and wild salmon – no farm-raised, thank you. There’s no grain, preservatives or mystery meat filler and the snacks are freeze-dried, rather than dehydrated, to preserve nutrients.
As you’d expect, it doesn’t sell cheap. Kaufman reckons his marquee brand, Real Food Toppers, is the most expensive pet snack you can buy at an eye-popping $15 US for a four-ounce package.
The gourmet kibble business was brisk even before the pet food scandal. It got crazy afterward.
“It was huge,” Kaufman said. “Distributors specializing in better pet products couldn’t keep up.”
OK, but where’s the lesson for farmers in this?
What’s key, said Kaufman, is how the contamination, which sickened thousands of pets and killed at least 16, changed the way many people look at the global food trade. The mental image of workers in an unregulated factory in a far-flung province in China grinding up a cheap industrial chemical and mixing it into a food ingredient is powerful and deeply disturbing.
“People are waking up,” Kaufman said. “There are more people reading ingredient labels and more people asking questions. What are these ingredients and where are they from? Are they inspected or tested? Are they safe?”
What would be the ramifications if contaminated ingredients made their way into human food, Kaufman asked.
“I’m sorry to say it, but I think it’s inevitable. You just can’t expect the Food and Drug Administration or the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to test everything coming into the country,” he said.
“What happens then? Well, if I was a farmer, I would want to be positioned in the value-added, premium market where you can validate what you fed your animals, what you put on your crops, and answer any other concerns that people are going to have about food safety.”
Now, Kaufman isn’t suggesting that some big food scare will chase hordes of consumers into the countryside so they can toss fistfuls of cash at natural meat producers, artisan cheese makers and organic vegetable growers.
Food scandals come and then fade away, and he expects contaminated wheat gluten will one day be mostly forgotten. He also expects that he and his fellow niche specialty makers will remain pipsqueaks in the $18 billion a year North American pet food business.
But he’s confident they’ll be profitable pipsqueaks with a customer base that becomes larger every time there’s a scandal or health scare.
“Events like this really solidify your customer base,” he said. “It gets people thinking and makes them remember that old saying, ‘you get what you pay for.’ “
We hear a lot about the need to be globally competitive, but Kaufman argues there are limits.
“Hey, if it’s electronics or a T-shirt or a dog leash, I don’t care where it comes from,” said Kaufman. “But this is food, this is what I put into my body.”
Of course, none of this is reason enough to chuck commodity agriculture and go into high-end, specialty niche production. On the other hand, it’s become a lot harder to dismiss the natural food movement as fad and foolishness that won’t last.
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns can be found in the news desk section at www.farmcentre.com.
