I have been in contact with Blue Seal, who sells By Nature Organics cat food since the end of January, after one of my cats vomited after eating their food.  She'd eaten only one meal of their canned Organic Turkey & Chicken, about two tablespoons.  Twelve hours later, she threw up what looked like grain hulls--that's about all but stomach fluids that was vomited.  Since the food is supposed to be grain-free, I looked at the opened can of food to see if that was the source of the "hulls" and, upon closer inspection, the "hulls" were evident in significant quantities in the food.  The "hulls" were darker than the food, and roughly cylindrical in shape (although the cylinders were torn rather than being intact). http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg194/guguyni/withruler.jpg

I called the toll-free number on the can, and spoke to a customer service representative, who asked me to send a sample of the "hulls."  Out of curiosity, I opened two additional cans of By Nature Organics food--different varieties than the first--and found the "hulls" in them as well.  I sent samples of all three varieties of cat food to the company.

On Feb. 7 I got a call from someone from Kent Feeds, which is owned by the same parent company as Blue Seal, who tried to convince me that it was only guar gum that had coagulated due to overheating.  I told her that it didn't look like random coagulation to me--that they had form and structure--and I sent her an e-mail with a link to a photo of the "hulls."

On Feb. 8 I got a call from the customer service rep I had sent to samples to.  He told me the brown "hulls" were just bone fragments. I told him that they were not firm or brittle--that they were flexible--and they didn't resemble any bone I had ever seen.  I had also looked at the "hulls" microscopically, and they showed cellular structure typical of plants--not bone.  I also told him that this same cat had no problem digesting bone, so I didn't believe that it was bone fragments in the food.  He referred me to a company nutritionist.

After talking to someone who had examined the samples I'd sent, the nutritionist told me that they looked like "husks" of some kind and that they were trying to contact the manufacturer (Evangers) to help identify them. She also told me that they were unable to locate the samples at the moment.  She told me they were trying to "get to the bottom of it." She also told me to hold onto the cans I had as "evidence" and not to feed any more to my cat until they knew what was going on.

I called the nutritionist again on Feb 11, and she told me that they were, indeed, grain hulls. I asked her how I could be sure that there weren't other things in the food (like the grain itself) that weren't listed on the label, and she said there was no way to know without analysis.  Because one of my cats is diabetic, and is currently in diet-controlled remission by being on a low-carb diet, this was very disconcerting!  I had picked this food because it is supposed to be grain-free and low in carbs, but the nutritionist was telling me that there was no way to know for sure what was in the food without having it analized!

I told her that I had found several other people who also had problems with the food (folks on other forums I belong to), and that the "hulls" were present in at least five varieties and in multiple lot numbers of those varieties.  I sent them the list of varieties/lots we had accumulated at the time:

Organic Turkey and Turkey Liver
24 70E 7BL 6
22 70E 6BL 5
17 70E 08 BL 3
16 70E 24 BL 3
2270E20BL2
24 70E 7BL 5

Organic Turkey and Chicken
24 70E 7BV 4
13 70? ?5 BV 3 Digits were smeared and illegible
2270E23BV2
24 70E 7BV 4

Organic Chicken and Chicken Liver
2370E8 BB 3
18 70E 01 BB 2
17 70E 02 BB 1
2270E22BB1

Chicken and Mackeral
17 70E 09 BM 2

I was told that I would be updated when they determined just what was in the food.  I didn't hear anything from them again, so I called them yesterday, March 17.  I was told that the contamination was so widespread that they couldn’t narrow it down to specific lot numbers.  She also told me that the manufacturer was not cooperating with them in trying to identify the "hulls" and that they were in the process of looking for a new manufacturer.  She refered me to another employee for more information.  I talked to him this morning.  He said they have been unable to identify the "hulls" any more specifically than that they were some sort of grain.  He also told me that the hulls were inconsistently present within affected lots--some cans had lots of them, other cans didn't.  This raises questions in my mind about a second aspect of quality control--if the food isn't being mixed consistently, how can we be sure that the nutritional supplements are consistent from can to can?  If the food isn't mixed thoroughly, some cans might contain high levels of supplements, while other cans might contain low levels.

Because they haven't been "inundated with calls" about the food, nothing is being done other than telling those people who call to complain to send the cans back for a refund.  The two employees I've been communicating with the most have both voiced frustration with the lack of action by the people in the position to actually do something.  One even told me "I have no control over the money, or whether they lose their job, and I can't shoot them, so there you have it!"

If anyone else had problems with By Nature Organics food, or sees small brown "hulls" in their food, please post here AND contact the company.  I am also notifying my state office of the FDA to lodge a complaint. 

Sounds like the flaxseed bits that are in the canned food I use, but By Nature doesn't have flax listed on their labels.

5 cats posted a picture of the "hulls"
Doesn't look anything like flaxseed to me.

Looks more like someone swept the floor and threw it in the mix.

Brown rice hulls maybe???
Strip the hulls and have the white rice???

I bet someone in your state could help you identify those hulls.  Like an agricultural college or state ag services.  That's a shame those were in there.

What is that stuff.     There is so much of it.  They do resemble "hulls" or "skins" of some sort. At first I thought they might be some insect material, but when I enlarged your photo, it doesn't look like insect material.

I did have a cat vomit up a food that had rice in it (different brand) and it looked similar to that, but only a few pieces and they looked white when vomited.  Mine looked like rice hulls, for lack of a better description. 

Has your cat had any vomiting episodes since off this food?

kaffe:  I would think if you ran the food under water for awhile you could possibly separate it.

Kind of looks like dried soybean pods/hulls.

I'll look & see if I have any cans. I think the last ones I had were their 95% meat ones.

The hair was from the cats, and anything else was from the carpet (because the picture is actually of the hulls she threw up--they were more obvious than from the rinsed food (because with the rinsed food, some of the hulls still had food inside them, making it harder to tell it was just the hulls, not actual grains). I rinsed off what little liquid was thrown up along with the hulls so I could try to figure out what they were, since none of my cats had ever vomited something that looked like what she up-chucked before... Sorry if this is too graphic...

I find that's the case on all the other cat forums I belong to, as well.  We're generally not a squeamish lot... 

I have cans from three of the lots listed, and there are two different expiration dates listed (Nov 2010 and Dec 2010).  The Blue Seal employee I talked to told me that the presence of the hulls was so widespread, that they couldn't isolate the contamination to specific lot numbers.  Another employee told me that the hulls were inconsistently present within affected lot numbers, like the food you found.  I find it hard to believe that this is a case of: because it is found in so many lots--too many to isolate!  The cans I have contain the hulls distributed throughout the sample in large quantities, as far as I can tell.