Courtney Jorstad  |  June 1, 2015

Category: Consumer News

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Blue Buffalo pet foodPet food maker Blue Buffalo Co. Ltd. has responded to allegations against the company that it did not accurately disclose the ingredients in its pet food.

Blue Buffalo was hit with class action lawsuits by customers and competitor Nestle Purina, alleging that the while Blue Buffalo’s pet foods come with a guarantee, called the “True Blue Promise,” that the pet food products are made with the best ingredients and provides a nutritious diet for customers’ pets and are made without both poultry byproducts and artificial preservatives, Nestle Purina discovered through its own testing that this was not the case.

According to testing allegedly done by Purina, almost a quarter of the Blue Buffalo pet food is made with poultry byproducts.

Blue Buffalo began facing class action lawsuits last spring by customers as well as by Nestle Purina, alleging that the company fraudulently marketed its pet food. In October 2014, seven of the class action lawsuits filed against Blue Buffalo were consolidated by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) in the Missouri federal court in St. Louis under U.S. District Judge Rodney W. Sippel.

Blue Buffalo responded on its website to what it calls “misinformation out there” about happening “on the legal front.”

The company says that it has filed its own lawsuits against its suppliers, Wilbur-Ellis Company and Diversified Ingredients, Inc., “for the intentional mislabeling of certain ingredients that were shipped to us and other well-known pet food brands through May 2014.”

Blue Buffalo filed court documents over the matter, including a lawsuit against the suppliers, “so they can be held fully accountable for their actions.”

The pet food maker called the claims made by Nestle Purina part of a “smear campaign, attacking our integrity.”

As a result, Blue Buffalo has filed a counter-lawsuit against Nestle Purina in which it claims
that the testing that Nestle Purina had done on its pet food was a “pseudoscientific sham” that was done by “an individual working out of his basement who faked his credentials, and whose methodology — which consisted of looking at Blue Buffalo’s pet foods under a low-powered microscope — is utterly unreliable and contrary to industry standards.”

Blue Buffalo says that it enlisted “one of America’s leading microscopy experts” who detailed “the numerous flaws in Nestle Purina’s tests.”

“Blue Buffalo specifically denies that its product formulas contain chicken or poultry by-product meals, corn, or artificial preservatives, or that its grain-free product formulas contain grains,” it says in the court documents filed with the court over the allegations in the Blue Buffalo class action lawsuits.

The pet food maker admits that its suppliers, Wilbur-Ellis and Diversified, “were engaged in a years-long pattern of misconduct that resulted in the presence of poultry by-product meal in some of the Blue Buffalo products.”

Blue Buffalo explains that the suppliers “passed off poultry by-product meal and/or ‘feathermeal’ as more expensive chicken and turkey meal in numerous shipments.”

However, it says that “the substitution was both unknown and unknowable to Blue Buffalo at the time it occurred.”

Blue Buffalo is represented by Steven A. Zalesin, Adeel A. Mangi, Jonah M. Knobler, and Vivian R.M. Storm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, by Martin Flumenbaum and Robert Atkins of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, by Gerard T. Carmody, David H. Luce and Sarah J. Bettag of Carmody MacDonald P.C., and by Richard MacLean.

Purina’s spokesman, Keith Schopp, said that “Despite this admission, Blue Buffalo has still not informed consumers of the presence of poultry by-product meal in Blue Buffalo pt food, refuses to accept responsibility for the product it sold and is instead blaming its suppliers.”

UPDATE: Blue Buffalo has announced that it will pay $32 million to settle the pet food class action lawsuits.

UPDATE 2: On Jan. 11, 2018, Top Class Actions viewers started receiving checks in the mail from the Blue Buffalo pet food ingredients class action settlement worth as much as $736.54. Congratulations to everyone who filed a claim and got PAID!

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2 thoughts onBlue Buffalo Responds to Class Actions, Hits Purina With Counter-Lawsuit

  1. Top Class Actions says:

    UPDATE: Instructions on how to file a claim for the Blue Buffalo Pet Food Ingredients Class Action Settlement are now available! Click here or visit http://www.PetFoodSettlement.com for details.

  2. Top Class Actions says:

    UPDATE: Blue Buffalo has announced that it will pay $32 million to settle the pet food class action lawsuits.

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