Comment by jolt42
18 hours ago
True, recently Rachel Ray sold her dog food brand. I didn't know until my dog started having digestion issues with it. That's how I found out it had been sold and other dogs were also having issues. Apparently buyer cheapened the recipe. At least we have the internet to quickly get the word out that it isn't what it used to be.
There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
Let me introduce you to a little thing called Private Equity.
I know it well, made me quit one job and I will never work for “it” again. Still, when they go after the dogs I get upset.
The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
> The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.
For your steelman to be relevant it would have to be reflected by lowering the price, otherwise they're just making the product worse for no customer benefit whatsoever and hoping customers take a long time to notice.
And if they were trying to offer a different value proposition by reducing the quality in order to lower the price, the honest way to do it would be to introduce a new product with a different name rather than changing what the product is while leaving the name the same.
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> There’s a special place in hell for people who would buy a dog food brand only to make worse dog food…
And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
I agree that we shouldn't treat humans worse than animals but one important factor here is that humans are much better at expressing themselves when their body badly reacts to some food. Animals often lack the ability to tell you that something is wrong and some may even be genetically inclined to actively hide any issues from you as showing weakness would have gotten their ancestors killed in the wild.
As someone who works very close to this I’m well aware, it’s also very visible when you look at trends over decades in most populations. It has significant impact on a lot of people.