Sunday, September 21, 2014

Blue Buffalo lawsuit update

So, as most of you know, I feed Blue Buffalo Wilderness to my kitties. As some of you probably also know, Blue Buffalo was sued by Purina earlier this year. Purina claimed that Blue Buffalo was falsely advertising. Purina claimed that they sent samples of Blue Buffalo food to a laboratory that performed highly sophisticated testing that PROVED that Blue Buffalo used chicken by-products and other ingredients that they say they do NOT. Blue Buffalo has finally gotten Purina to release the "test results" and methods used and I've read them. They do not prove anything whatsoever. The tests consisted of a 10x-20x microscope analysis of the food after it had been broken down with chemicals. Then these ingredients were analyzed (by visual cues) and determined to be certain things (based on a book of ingredients). This type of testing is not reliable (it also is not scientific because the ingredients can be interpreted differently since they will certainly NOT look exactly like the book). On top of that, this was supposedly a "blind" test, but while reading the paper, it was clearly not a TRUE blind test. So, Purina is basing their whole lawsuit on these tests, which are not scientific or accurate. On top of that Purina is now saying that Blue Buffalo claims their food is "human-grade", which they don't. This idea of Purina's comes from Blue Buffalo's slogan, which is "Love Them Like Family, Feed Them Like Family". This does not say anything about human-grade food (it is simply a slogan, something that many companies have). This lawsuit seems like a pathetic attempt by Purina to complain about competition (they even state that they have lost sales to BB). They KNOW people are getting ingredient savvy and they don't like it because it hurts their profits (a Purina employee said this not too long ago). So, until Purina can provide better evidence (I'm a biology student so I know what should be done for these types of tests), I don't believe them and will continue to purchase Blue Buffalo for my kitties.

1 comment:

  1. With the information that BB released about the POSSIBILITY of chicken (or poultry) by-products in their food, I am a little upset... However, my cats have not gotten sick and since BB says that they have stopped doing business with the plant responsible, I will continue feeding unless something else comes out that changes my mind. My cats are also still getting Wild Calling! dry food (rabbit, salmon and turkey), Sheba canned food, and Nature's Variety Instinct raw food.

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