“Millions” of Roaches at Pedigree and IAMS Plant?

A new report chronicles an alleged “millions” of roaches at a Mars Petcare U.S. Inc. canning plant, where pet foods by brands like Pedigree, Cesar, Whiskas, Nutro and IAMS are produced.

Yuck!

But what’s really going on here?

In this video, I explain what you need to know right now. (And just to be clear, this is not a recall alert. It’s a … roach alert. Nothing has been recalled. That doesn’t make it any less yucky.)

Here is the link to the report from Food Safety News.

And if you’re new to Petful, here’s more about our free recall alerts.

Video Transcript

Pedigree. Cesar. Whiskas. Nutro. IAMS. Is roach meat the new secret ingredient?

Let me explain in this special Petful recall alert — actually, scratch that. Petful roach alert.

Millions of roaches at a Mars Petcare U.S. canning plant in Columbus, Ohio. That’s the story that’s making the rounds today. A new report from Food Safety News details various inspection problems in 2016 and 2017, including one reference to millions of roaches.

“Millions of roaches” is a headline that definitely grabs your attention right away. But I want to just try to bring us back to reality here. Here’s what we know.

The FDA inspected the Mars Petcare plant and did find a roach infestation. They also looked at the pest control operator’s own notes. Mars Petcare had its own pest control company. That company kept some records, and the FDA inspectors got their hands on that information, and found other references to roaches and things like damaged cans with flies on them and things like that. That’s one thing.

Then, we also know that Mars Petcare kept an employee complaints file where employees would report sightings of roaches. This was specifically for pest complaints. There were dozens of complaints about roaches between late 2016 and mid 2017.

There was one person who said, Oh yeah, there’s millions of roaches. That’s where this headline is coming from, “millions of roaches.” It was one employee who wrote down, There are millions of roaches here.

That’s why I think things are a little bit exaggerated here. To me, it sounds like something akin to the office prankster writing in “Santa Claus” on the weekly cleanup list, or something like that.

Were there roaches? Absolutely. Do roaches remain at this facility? Mars Petcare would like you to think that they’re all cleaned up. We don’t know.

Would I feed my pet these brands, knowing about the roaches? Well, I wouldn’t personally feed these brands to begin with. But for me, it’s not the fact that there were roaches sighted in the plant; it’s the totality of it all.

We’ve got notes and observations of not only roaches, but we’ve got maggots. We’ve got flies. We’ve got things like, again, damaged cans with flies on them, and that kind of thing, raw materials leaking out excessively. Those are the things that I look at and I’m like, what are they doing about them?

But not only that, but Mars Petcare actually stymied the investigation by the FDA. They didn’t allow them into certain areas or let them look at certain things, which delayed the inspections. What should have probably taken a couple of days turned into a 2-week-long ordeal.

It makes me question the integrity of the company. It makes me question just how transparent they are.

I like total transparency. Admit the problem, tell us what you’re doing to fix it, and be totally honest and upfront about it.

I want to see, “Wow, this is crazy. We should not have let this get this bad. We’re fixing it, and here’s what we’re doing.” Not “You can’t look in this area. Don’t look over here,” and that kind of thing.

That’s what bothers me. I hope that makes sense.