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Pet Feed Ingredient Supplier Pleads Guilty

Wilbur-Ellis, pet feed ingredient supplier linked in the Purina v Blue Buffalo lawsuit, has plead guilty to “substituting lower-cost ingredients for premium, more expensive chicken and turkey meal in shipments from a plant in Rosser, Texas, to pet food manufacturers between June 2013 and May 2014.”

Wilbur-Ellis, pet feed ingredient supplier linked in the Purina v Blue Buffalo lawsuit, has plead guilty to “substituting lower-cost ingredients for premium, more expensive chicken and turkey meal in shipments from a plant in Rosser, Texas, to pet food manufacturers between June 2013 and May 2014.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

…a California-based feed company and a Ballwin commodities broker had been mis-labeling pet food ingredients for years, substituting lower-cost poultry feathers, ground into feather meal, and byproducts for premium ingredients, according to two guilty pleas entered in federal court in the last month.

The California company, Wilbur-Ellis Feed LLC, are likely to be placed on probation for three years later this year and pay out nearly $5.5 million, according to the company’s guilty plea.

As part of the plea, Wilbur-Ellis Feed admitted substituting lower-cost ingredients for premium, more expensive chicken and turkey meal in shipments from a plant in Rosser, Texas, to pet food manufacturers between June 2013 and May 2014. On one or more occasions, the plea says, that lower cost product was hydrolyzed poultry feathers or hydrolyzed feather meal, which consists of ground-up feathers.

What is significant of the last paragraph above is that Wilbur-Ellis admitted to shipping (basically) ground feathers to more than one pet food manufacturer labeled as chicken or turkey meal. Because of the lawsuit between Purina and Blue Buffalo – we know that Blue Buffalo was one of the manufacturers that received the waste ingredient. Sad but true, consumers have no information who else Wilbur-Ellis shipped feather meal to – what other pet foods were sold to unknowing consumers containing feathers instead of chicken meal.

The pet feed ingredient broker Diversified Ingredients involved in the incident (middle-man between ingredient supplier and pet food manufacturer) also plead guilty and “could face up to a year in prison” though his attorney will ask for probation.

McAtee, a trader, broker and co-owner of Diversified Ingredients Inc. of Ballwin, admitted in his plea that the pet food companies that were his company’s clients received adulterated and misbranded pet food ingredients from the Rosser facility between 2012 and May 2014. One client received the ingredients between 2012 and May 2014, his plea says. Other companies, which were not identified in the plea but which made and packed food for Blue Buffalo, received multiple adulterated shipments between 2012 and May of 2014.

McAtee removed the word “blend” from some documents and forged signatures of a Wilbur-Ellis employee on forms to conceal the source or contents of shipments, his plea says.

The full details of the plea agreement are not provided in court records. To read the original charges against Wilbur-Ellis, click here.

As discouraging as this might seem for pet food consumers, this plea deal is a big step forward in holding guilty pet food parties accountable. As comparison, back in 2009 when ChemNutra pled guilty for one count each of distributing adulterated food and selling misbranded food linked to the melamine contaminated ingredients responsible for the deadliest pet food recall in history – a judge sentenced ChemNutra only $35,000 in fines and three years of probation.

Maybe…we will see more criminal and federal charges against pet food manufacturers and ingredient suppliers in the near future. Maybe pet food/feed manufacturers and ingredient suppliers will be concerned enough about multi-million dollar fines and potential prison time to stop violating law. Maybe.

 

Wishing you and your pet(s) the best,

Susan Thixton
Pet Food Safety Advocate
Author Buyer Beware, Co-Author Dinner PAWsible
TruthaboutPetFood.com
Association for Truth in Pet Food


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13 Comments

13 Comments

  1. Jane Democracy

    May 24, 2018 at 10:22 am

    This is huge!!!!!!! Wilbur Ellis and Diversified are big players in the pet food industry. My thought is, if they did it to one company they did it to them all.

  2. Woofielover

    May 24, 2018 at 10:46 am

    Maybe they thought they were shipping to Royal Canin who intends to use feathers/feather meal instead of meats as their proteins in their foods?! McAtee is guilty but it’s a bit of a stretch to think someone at Blue Buffalo didn’t know. If it were so easy for Purina to find out and expose Blue Buffalo, why wasn’t Blue Buffalo monitoring their supply chains themselves? Every manufacturer is ultimately responsible for the ingredients in their foods, no exceptions.

  3. Fiona

    May 24, 2018 at 11:09 am

    Nothing surprises me anymore. It’s big business and that’s it…the bottom dollar

  4. Laurie Raymond

    May 24, 2018 at 11:24 am

    These ingredient suppliers, and the renderers and processors who produce these ingredients from whole food sources, are deliberately concealed by the pet food industry. It is not possible to trace these ingredients back to their original sources without skipping these “middle-men.” This is a huge industry in itself and it has proven to be the villain in many adulteration cases, revealed only when the pet food manufacturer sues its supplier. When will we realize most of our efforts to force the pet food industry to uphold a meaningful standard of transparency will fail unless we demand that pet food companies reveal the sources of each ingredient in each batch? In this industry, as in all industries, companies vary in their reputation for quality and honesty. Violations are on record. But instead of competing for pet food company business, the worst can rely on the invisibility guaranteed them by pet food companies’ refusal to identify them – until someone catches them out and they are forced to sue to save their own reputations. THIS IS WHERE WE SHOULD BE FOCUSING OUR EFFORTS!

  5. Cannoliamo

    May 24, 2018 at 1:32 pm

    I’m not sure I know the full story here, but why did it take a Purina lawsuit to get this into Federal Court and then only on misdemeanor charges. The probation judgement looks like more of a hand-slap than a real punishment for fraud and product tampering. Where was FDA, USDA, PFI, California Department of Food and Agriculture ??? Can any agency be relied on for any regulatory monitoring and punitive actions for pet food products? Are there any ingredient standards that they will enforce without a law suit? Why has it taken 5 years to get a judgement? Maybe this is why Smuckers and many other manufacturers see pet food sales as such a safe and unregulated market.

    • Laurie Raymond

      May 25, 2018 at 10:52 am

      Why? you ask! Have you heard or read nothing about the revolving door between government and industry? Missed the discussion of the current state of our capitalist economy with its absolute primacy of short-term shareholder value? Ever heard a basic economist discuss the role of “externalities” – the costs to production that are never paid by the producers but sloughed off to the public or consumers or the environment or all the above? Like pollution? Like using toxic waste products from other industries and disguising them with appealing images and verbiage? This is the current state of our economy and its relationship to government and to us, as citizens, consumers and dupes. It is only as citizens that we can do anything about it. Why don’t we?

  6. Pamela Miller

    May 24, 2018 at 3:22 pm

    PERSONALLY, I would like to be repaid for all the CRAP dog food I’ve been feeding my poor dog all these years !! From Purina to Ol’ Roy, to Blue Buffalo….. I’ve probably spent $30 a month for over 8 years !!!!!!!!!!! Rotten, greedy people !!

  7. CB

    May 24, 2018 at 4:03 pm

    Why aren’t pet food companies testing the ingredients they receive? Maybe I want to pretend I don’t know the answer to that 🙁

    • Johanna

      October 24, 2018 at 10:53 pm

      Except to now what is actually in 99.9% of pet food would actually horrify you. There are no regulations on pet food like human food. We feed our pets food that we would NEVER eat ourselves. In fact most of the food that goes into pet food is forbidden by the FDA to use in human food. Call your pet food company and ask if they use human grade food and listen to the run around you will get. They cannot legally say “no”, if they don’t. Or make your own food which is truly best. The vet bills you have been paying all of those years is what I would charge them for because more than likely your animals got sick on their food, such as cancer IBS, renal failure and the like. We need to change the laws!

  8. Hannie

    May 24, 2018 at 6:46 pm

    After the huge fiasco in 07, I personally think Wilbur-Ellis needs to be put out of business. Let them peddle their garbage elsewhere. I absolutely do not trust commercial pet food, haven’t since the research I did after that huge recall…….human food may not be a whole lot better but at least it’s not made up of feathers, beaks & feet. OMG, that grosses me out.

  9. Mirsades

    May 25, 2018 at 12:21 am

    This is so infuriating. The date(s) mentioned are when my cat started getting sick from eating Blue Buffalo food and is still not well to this day. I have spent over $7000 already seeing specialists and different vets and will have to continue with medications the rest of his life. He was diagnosed at around 1 1/2 years old and he is only 7 years old now. I would like to know how to sue Blue Buffalo, and others, for all these vet bills, their lousy food and all the pain and suffering I continue to go through taking care of my precious cat. If anyone knows where to start, please point me in the right direction.

  10. ian

    May 25, 2018 at 2:17 pm

    I find it hard to believe that this only happened over 2 years and to only one pet food company. This is just the tip of the iceberg. As I understand it this lawsuit is only between the pet food companies, and consumers are not involved. I hope some greedy (oops, did I say that? I meant altruistic) lawyers will now get involved and file a class action lawsuit on behalf of the pet owners that bought that food.

  11. Judy

    October 15, 2018 at 9:33 pm

    Where does the 5.5 million dollars go that they are fined? I want to know why this company isn’t responsible for paying us the consumer back who bought all this crap dog food. I guess a class action suit is going to need to be filed. But how is anybody going to prove they bought these dog foods. Who keeps grocery receipts from seven years ago. Sounds like another profit deal for someone.

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