RHINELANDER, Wis., May 1 /PRNewswire/ — When veterinarians’ Doctors Foster and Smith began their company, now the nation’s largest Internet and catalogue retailer of pet products, they based their future on direct communication with customers desiring professional advice and quality pet supplies. That has proven to be a fortuitous decision. Now, 25 years later, 2,448 customers personally affected by the dry food recall are receiving immediate email alerts, phone calls and letters that provide professional advice on the pet food recall.
Thanks to its comprehensive database, Doctors Foster and Smith know exactly who received its recalled product and are proactively reaching out to those customers to make sure that they dispose of the product, get quality advice that calms their fears and provide regular updates for the recalled items in the company’s dog and cat foods lines — Doctors Foster and Smith’s Adult Lite Dog Food and Adult Lite Cat Food. Furthermore, Doctors Foster and Smith are helping to answer questions for any pet owners who are concerned about the industry-wide recall as a whole.
“Our website and call center are receiving informational requests from both our customers and our competitor’s customers, seeking veterinarian consultation,” said Dr. Race Foster of Doctors Foster and Smith. “To help meet these requests, our veterinary and pharmacy staff have set up http://www.drsfostersmith.com/recall, where the most commonly asked questions are addressed by a licensed veterinarian.”
Doctors Foster and Smith is working closely with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other experts to help ensure that precautions are put in place to prevent such recalls from happening in the future. The vast majority of this most recent recall in the pet food industry involved canned food, but Doctors Foster and Smith has issued no recall on its canned products. Most of the products that were affected by the recall were manufactured in Canada and overseas.
As an American manufacturer, Doctors Foster and Smith works to ensure that all the nutritional ingredients are of the best quality and strives to achieve the highest degree of wellness for the pets of its customers.
Because Doctors Foster and Smith prefers a fresher, more nutritional product that doesn’t sit on the shelf for months, its pet foods are made just before shipping. Thus, the quantity of customers affected was limited to 2,448 before the company determined a recall was required. The recall was necessitated due to the discovery of possibly tainted ingredients purchased from Wilbur-Ellis, a supplier of the rice protein ingredients that are included within specific items in the Drs. Foster and Smith product lines. The Wilbur-Ellis recall was also voluntary.
Fortunately, no confirmed illness or death has been reported by the Doctors Foster and Smith’s pet owners. Of the 2,448 customers, 1,647 were dog-food only purchasers and 747 were cat-food only purchasers, with 54 ordering both dog and cat product.
Currently, Doctors Foster and Smith products are only available direct to the customer, eliminating the need to remove any product from retail shelves. Only Adult Lite Dry Dog Food item numbers 14178, 14179, 14180, 14262 and 14263 and Adult Dry Lite Cat Food item numbers 12855, 12856, 13864 and 13865 purchased between January 22 and April 19, 2007 are included in this precautionary recall.
Doctors Foster and Smith’s newly reformulated Adult Lite Dry Dog and Adult Lite Dry Cat food is already shipping directly to customers. Upon learning of the voluntary recall by Wilbur-Ellis, Doctors Foster and Smith immediately contacted the 2,448 customers by email and phone, and posted 60 Fed Ex letters to those customers not responding to direct phone contact. Customers reported that the immediate contact helped ease their concerns. That was in direct contrast to the experience of pet owners who bought other manufacturer’s products at retail and found it difficult to reach anyone at those companies to answer their questions.
“Our first priority is the comfort, wellness and care of our customer’s pets and we will go to great expense, if necessary, to make sure that those are ensured,” said Dr. Marty Smith of Doctors Foster and Smith, which is the only significantly-sized pet product company in the industry managed by veterinarians. “Our veterinarian staff and pharmacists acted quickly to guarantee that the reformulation was ready to meet the demands of our loyal customer base.”
Dr. Race Foster and Dr. Marty Smith are implementing preventative measures to be actively pursed with legislators, manufacturers and brokers of ingredients imported into the USA. These efforts include complementing the active role of the FDA in quality control of raw materials, manufacturing processes and testing protocols to immediately recognize potential causes of diseases and disorders found in any pet food products.
About Doctors Foster and Smith
Doctors Foster and Smith, a privately owned company, is the #1 catalog and online seller of pet supplies and pharmaceuticals in the industry. Doctors Foster and Smith is known for empowering pet owners by providing extensive veterinarian-supported advice, proprietary information and quality pet products serving millions of pet owners from coast to coast. Dr. Race Foster and Dr. Marty Smith have become the nation’s foremost authorities on pet wellness, pet care and pet-owner education, earning an unmatched reputation for the scope of their veterinary expertise on dogs, cats, fish, birds, reptiles, pond life, small animals and equine. For more information, visit http://www.drsfostersmith.com/ and http://www.peteducation.com/.
