Menu Foods, Inc. is the company behind the massive 60-MILLION-CAN pet food recall. They make grain-oriented base product for dozens of pet food brands. Budget to high-end brands use their product. The great folks at PetConnection.com have received over 2,400 submissions of pets that died from this awful disaster. Our Dog Blogger, Joy Ward has been covering this in great detail. Thanks to Joy and our members for getting the paw out faster then any single news source.

UPDATE: F.D.A confirms presences of other chemical, melamine, a fertilizer agent. Dry foods may now also be suspect. See breaking New York Times story.

The recall was first announced after healthy pets suddenly started dying of kidney and other organ failure. The company first claimed that curdled wheat gluten was the cause. The New York Times found out that Menu Recall killed 7 animals they test-fed to confirm their food was lethal.

Later the company admitted that it was due to rat poison having gotten into the food supply. Think about how much rat poison needs to get mixed into 60 million cans of food for animals to start dying within hours of eating.

Today the ASPCA released a very stern warning saying that rat poison alone could not explain the diversity of cause-of-deaths. I also have to point out the Menu Foods website is a disaster with no text or working images. For shame Menu Foods! For Shame.

Explains the ASPCA’s Dr. Steven Hansen, veterinary toxicologist, “There are so many inconsistencies in the purported link between aminopterin and the animals affected that we urge veterinary toxicologists and veterinary pathologists at diagnostic laboratories to continue looking for additional contaminants.”

If we love our pets as much as family, how can it be that our federal health policies require a fraction of the oversight in the pet food production as it does for human food? How many times will we have to say that pets are people too for a government to get off it’s duff? Why has their been no Congressional Inquiry? No thumping of chests about how they won’t stand for such disrespect of their constituents? Let’s demand legislation that puts food manufacturers of any sort equally scrutinized. If they want to be in the business of providing food for life, we cannot accept different allowances for failure.

I had a great time presenting at the Startup Epicenter conference in Mt. View. The attendees were mostly experienced and focused entrepreneurs and the format allowed for a lot of questions and open conversations. I was asked to speak about Dogster, Inc. in regards to what worked, what didn’t and why and the attendees had sharp, challenging and insightful questions that I found both refreshing and thought provoking.

It was a nice change to be around people that were concerned with the business of their business, and I definitely recommend an event of theirs to anyone wanting to get up to speed on running a tech business.

For all the people that requested, you can download the slides here (PDF - 3Mb).

Menu Foods allowed rat poison to get into it’s food and hundreds and possibly thousands of beloved pets are dead. I even read in the New York Times that Menu Foods killed 7 “study” animals as part of their post-recall testing.

We here at Dogster and Catster are devastated by this. The FDA should cover animal food processing as closely as they do human food. It’s simply reprehensible that anyone should have the right to make food to keep a human or animal alive that does the opposite. 60 million cans of wet food have been recalled. Menu Foods provides bulk ingredients to dozens of pet food brands, ranging from discount to high-end specialty foods.

There is a tribute site made to remember pets lost in this atrocity. http://menufoodsvictims.blogspot.com. I’m simply incapable of writing anymore without tears covering my keyboard so please, honor these pets and demand better of the companies and product you bring into your lives.

Think about Angel here and her family.

After publishing an article about Dogster’s successes, Red Herring is now using the photo as part of their new advertising campaign entitled “Interact with the Innovators” It’s quite an honor as the ad campaing also portrays Eric Schmidt, CEO Google, Steve Jobs, CEO Apple, and Mark Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com, not to mention Kevin and Jay of Digg.com and Chad and Steve of Youtube.com.

A special pleasure is that you can see the ad running in a current article with our long-term friend, advisor and investor Jeff Clavier about his recent investment in Kongregate a new community-oriented user-generated gaming site.

Here’s a screen shot of from the article. Funny stuff!
. Funny stuff ;>

Today we’re sharing with the whole world our entirely new local listings area. Since opening to our membership over 70,000 pet-friends places, businesses and services have been added, complete with contact info, dynamic maps, and downloadable address cards. Over 10,000 reviews have been written and 1,000 photos uploaded.

So go check out Dogster Local or Catster Local and see what you can find near you.

Anyone can now find information on local resources, ranging from veterinarians and dog parks to boutiques and cat sitters to dog-friendly diners in every town in the United States and beyond. Users to search, list, rate and review pet-specific businesses and pet-friendly locations by city, ZIP code and category. All these features are now freely available for anyone in the world to read, review, rate and add their own favorite places.

Have you ever needed to find a new trustworthy vet in a hurry? Have you ever been out of town and wanted to find a great dog park? Or how about a last minute sitter? Having obenience problems you can’t resolve? Now if you go to Dogster.com/local or Catster.com/local you’re one search away from finding names, addresses, maps, reviews, of the places near you. There’s also a Welfare area dedicated to rescue, adoption, and shelters, as well as a Travel feature for the pet jet-set.

We just thought it was about time that dog and cat owners could have one site to share the places that are important to them, and share their thoughts, good or bad, about them. If you had a bad experience at a vet or groomer, this would be the place to share that experience. Do you think a dog park is too rough for a small dog, then you can alert others to that fact.

It just seemed natural to us that our members would be the best and most credible source for information on pet-related businesses, services and locations. So we’ve built the best tool we could so they can do that in a way that everyone can benefit from.

If you are a writer or reporter you may also be interested to see our offical release for more details and quotes.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable, also has a good write-up

Wednesday the 27th of March, I’ll be doing a solo 45 minute presentation on “Community Development and User Generated Content.” at the Startup Epicenter Conference in Mountain View, CA. I’m hoping to make in quite interactive and my simple goal is to make sure that everyone will leave with the understanding that User Generated Content is an awful way to say Passionate Interactive Participation.

Then on April 17th I’m organizing a panel for the Web2.0 Expo titled “Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users.” Confirmed panelsts are Stewart butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us), Biz Stone (Twitter), all of whom employed massive amounts of customer particpation in many facets of traditional employee tasks. Dogster was able to get big on very little money be involving our members in product road map, QA, marketing, finding staff, community management, etc. etc. So I’m looking very forward to interview the Stewart, Joshua and Biz about their strategies, pit falls and success.

DETAILS:
• The Startup Epicenter, March 27-29th, Mt View, California
• Web2.0 Expo, April 15-18, Moscone Center, San Francisco, California

We just added some simple additions to our pet pages that are already site favorites. Now when a member is logged in and looking at one of their own pet pages, they can send that page to all their friends in the personal address book, whip up a site badge or one-click link to edit or add any content for their page page. Unlike other sites where you have to navigate to your profile to make changes, you can now do it right from your profile pages.

Here’s a screen shot of top of Moxie’s page when I see it.


 
Here’s a screenshot of our all-in-one-page ajaxy combo personalized message and address book builder.

I can’t even tell you how many more such improvements are being developed in the wings. And you’ve check out Local right? right!

Microformats are a way of information commonly found in web page, (e.g. contact information, calendar events, reviews, listings, etc.) easily extractable by other web services. The beauty of Microformats is that they use HTML class assignments such that you can simply markup your existing code to indicate which are the significant fields.

We recently rolled out hCard Microformats in all 70,000 pet-related businesses and locales listings in our Dogster and Catster Local areas. Now our listings will be indexed and found in search engines that just index hCard embedded pages. Even better with a click of a link any user can download that locale’s name/address/contact info, right to their desktop address book.

Next we will markup each listing to be hListing compliant and each written review will be hReview compliant. This is not going to change the world or even Dogster. In fact most users won’t even know about these additions in our source code, but it will mean that as search engines are developed to find just this type of structured data, our pages will be easily indexed and found.

The screen shots they use are very creative. I wish my Spanish wasn’t so rusty ;>

You can meet the producer’s dog below. La Girasol is spanish for flower and is also the name of their excellent dog-focused blog. Their blog-roll alone is barktastic! Check out all their dog blog friends. I’m off to intorduce them to Joy right now.

Stop by Girasol’s page and give her a bone!

Many many brands are affected. Many other stores were also involved.

An unknown number of cats and dogs suffered kidney failure and about 10 died after eating the affected pet food, Menu Foods said in announcing the North American recall. Product testing has not revealed a link explaining the reported cases of illness and death, the company said.

“At this juncture, we’re not 100 percent sure what’s happened,” said Paul Henderson, the company’s president and chief executive officer. However, the recalled products were made using wheat gluten purchased from a new supplier, since dropped for another source, spokeswoman Sarah Tuite said. Wheat gluten is a source of protein.

The company said it manufacturers for 17 of the top 20 North American retailers. It is also a contract manufacturer for the top branded pet food companies, including Procter & Gamble Co.

P&G announced Friday the recall of specific 3 oz., 5.5 oz., 6 oz. and 13.2 oz. canned and 3 oz. and 5.3 oz. foil pouch cat and dog wet food products made by Menu Foods but sold under the Iams and Eukanuba brands. The recalled products bear the code dates of 6339 through 7073 followed by the plant code 4197, P&G said.

Recalled cat foods
Americas Choice; Preferred Pets; Authority; Best Choice; Companion; Compliments; Demoulas Market Basket; Fine Feline Cat, Shep Dog; Food Lion; Foodtown; Giant Companion; Good n Meaty; Hannaford; Hill Country Fare; Hy-Vee; Key Food; Laura Lynn; Li’l Red; Loving Meals; Main Choice; Nutriplan; Nutro Max Gourmet Classics; Nutro Natural Choice; Paws; Presidents Choice; Price Chopper; Priority; Save-A-Lot; Schnucks; Sophistacat; Special Kitty; Springfield Pride; Sprout; Total Pet; My True Friend; Wegmans; Western Family; White Rose; and Winn Dixie.

Recalled dog foods
America’s Choice; Preferred Pets; Authority; Award; Best Choice; Big Bet; Big Red; Bloom; Bruiser; Cadillac; Companion; Demoulas Market Basket; Fine Feline Cat; Shep Dog; Food Lion; Giant Companion; Great Choice; Hannaford; Hill Country Fare; Hy-Vee; Key Food; Laura Lynn; Loving Meals; Main Choice; Mixables; Nutriplan; Nutro Max; Nutro Natural Choice; Nutro; Ol’Roy; Paws; Pet Essentials; Pet Pride; President’s Choice; Price Chopper; Priority; Publix; Roche Bros; Save-A-Lot; Schnucks; Springsfield Pride; Sprout; Stater Bros; Total Pet; My True Friend; Western Family; White Rose; Winn Dixie and Your Pet.

You can download the press release from our servers.

Please read the latest news and pass the word.