http://www.petfoodplantsolutions.com/html/about_nutro.html"At our Victorville facility, we produce only our dry premium pet food products (dry kibble).
In addition to Victorville, we have a plant operating in Tennessee."
http://www.petfoodplantsolutions.com/html/about_our_plant.html"In 2005, we built our state of the art pet food production plant in Victorville. Nutro has another, substantially similar, state-of-the-art facility in Tennessee, which, like our Victorville facility, is located near upscale homes (at approximately the same distance from the plant).
"
Nutro uses only high quality ingredients, virtually all of which arrive at the Victorville facility in dried meal form. We also use oils and related products to meet stringent nutritional requirements."
http://www.allpages.com/listings/n/n-3730.htmlNutro of Tennessee
920 Arctic Drive
Lebanon, TN (Tennessee) 37090-5344
Phone: (615) 449-4996
Nutro Products Inc
13243 Nutro Way
Victorville, CA (California) 92395-7789
Phone: (760) 951-8690So there are said to be only 2 plants--Victorville and Lebanon, TN.
According to the above, almost all ingredients enter the company through Victorville's plant.
http://itchmoforums.com/your-problems-with-pet-food/do-any-forum-readers-personally-have-problems-with-nutro-food-t5071.0.html;msg74412#msg74412The adlawbyrequest pdf is no longer online but take a look at the claim re: testing product-
Page 3-
"The testing protocol that Nutro attached (to its submission) indicates, without support, that any product samples created at least twenty minutes apart constitute separate "production batches". This statement seems to suggest that the average MEC (Metabolizable Energy Content) for the individual samples from a SINGLE production run--such as the 3057 kcal/kg result Nutro obtained on June 21--could, by itself, substantiate Nutro's "Lite" claim, even though Nutro averages the results from THREE separate production runs and cites this as its support in its submission.
Nutro's "20 minute" definition finds no support in AAFCO's guidelines, nor is there any authority to support it. In practice, samples from different production batches--as is required by AAFCO--are most easily identified on the retail shelf by looking for products that bear different date codes, as Hill's did in its testing. Page 4-
"The challenger took issue with the advertiser's explanation that the high MEC values obtained by the challenger's testing might be linked to
temporary product irregularities caused by Nutro's switchover from its Wilson Way production facility to new factories.
The challenger argued that it was unlikely that the samples it tested all came from the Victorville, CA plant, as opposed to Nutro's other production facility in Lebanon, TN, which, argued the challenger, the advertiser admitted has produced its "lite" dry products continuously since 1996. Moreover, argued the challenger, the advertiser had not provided evidence that there were, in fact, such temporary irregularities in its "lite" dry products' MEC levels at the Victorville facility.
"Second, argued the challenger, the samples it tested came from products actually available to the public for purchase (which is how it acquired them). It selected the products to be tested based on the date codes printed on the bags, to ensure a range of unique production lots, argued the challenger, and reported these codes with the test results. On the other hand, contended the challenger,
the advertiser apparently tested samples coming straight off the production line at one of its facilities (without specifying which one). Additionally, the advertiser did not state whether it tested samples of the same product formula that is now on store shelves and available to
Page 5
"consumers. Based on such information, argued the challenger, it is impossible to know exactly what the advertiser tested, including whether the three production runs tested were of the same formula and, if so, whether this was the reformulation described by the advertiser.
"Third, while the challenger submitted samples of the products to an independent laboratory for testing, the advertiser conducted its own in house testing. The challenger contended that "although in-house testing may be proper in some circumstances and it not per se less reliable, in light of the other deficiencies in Nutro's data and in light of the delays in Nutro's submissions and the shifting statements Nutro has made to NAD, this is an additional reason to credit Hill's results."
In the 2007 challenge, Hill's was challenging Nutro's claims regarding their Lite foods. So you see at the time, they were doing things much differently than AAFCO's guidelines state. Note also that the change from the Wilson Way (CA) plant to Victorville (CA) was made in 2007, as per the statements from this challenge.
