FDA’s Attempt At Transparency

The FDA has provided the public with some transparency.

The FDA Data Dashboard states: “The FDA created the Data Dashboard to increase transparency and accountability by displaying and allowing the analysis of public FDA data through easy to use, visually accessible, customizable, and understandable graphics.”

For any company (pet food or any human product) that is regulated by the FDA, consumers can search Inspections, Compliance issues, and Recalls. The FDA Data Dashboard contains a wealth of information, however there is a learning curve to it and it does not provide much detailed information.

Such as…

Starting at the FDA Data Dashboard home page:

When you click on “Inspections” under the Compliance Dashboards column, you will be taken to a page that includes Inspection information for ALL products that FDA regulates. Such as:

Also on this Inspections homepage, you will find more charts of Inspections by type, citations, an inspections map, Inspections Details, Citations Details and Published 483s (inspection reports).

When you look at the overview of Citation Details, the third item in the list provided is for Phillip’s Pet Food & Supplies Corporation (a pet food distributor):

If you click on that item (the FEI number) you see:

The page tells us this pet food distributor “did not take corrective action when there was a loss of temperature controls.”

But, that is all it tells us. Was this raw pet food, was this frozen cooked pet food? Was this some other product that required refrigeration? Was the product destroyed or was it shipped to pet stores with no disclosure of the ‘loss of temperature controls’? We don’t know.

In order for this transparency to truly benefit consumers, the full report needs to be provided – these questions need to be answered.

If you would like to search the Inspections of a particular pet food manufacturer, the FDA website offers a filter option. On the Inspections homepage, just above the first chart you will see the filter option. Click on that option and this sidebar will open:

We chose the option “Legal Name” and entered ‘Nestle Purina’, many different company names appeared. We checked all those that included Nestle Purina Petcare. And the results were another page specific to all of these Nestle Purina Petcare company names. The Inspection chart specific to Nestle Purina Petcare was this:

Specific to Nestle Purina Petcare Inspections Details were (there is a scroll option on the Inspections page to view more information than provided in the image below):

Specific to Nestle Purina Petcare Citations Details were:

And if you click on the FEI Number on the above Citations Details page, you will be taken to another page that gives you more details specific to this individual pet food manufacturing plant. When we clicked the first link – FEI Number 1924965 – we found this information specific to the Nestle Purina Pet Care Company plant in Hager City, WI.

You can search Recalls. If you wish to review recalls of any particular pet food, click on the Recalls link on the FDA Data Dashboard homepage and enter the filter options you wish to search for. Using the same example as above (Nestle Purina Pet Care Company):

And in the list of recalls for Nestle Purina Pet Care Company, when you click on the FEI Number for any recall, you will be taken to a page that will show you this:

If you want to learn more about a specific pet food manufacturer, this FDA website provides a lot of general information. It takes a little time to investigate and learn the site, and unfortunately we are not provided much details of inspections or compliance issues, but…the FDA Data Dashboard does give us a good start to investigate any pet food manufacturer. Baby steps for the FDA.

Wishing you and your pet(s) the best,

Susan Thixton
Pet Food Safety Advocate
TruthaboutPetFood.com
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