Behind the Paw 2011- Manufacturing Tour

Recently, mom was invited to attend an influencer summit sponsored by Iams and Eukanuba in Dayton Ohio. Unfortunately, I was not invited which Iams I totally don’t understand..I’m the voice of the blog…it is Prestonpeaks not Rachel speaks. But anyway, I decided to let my mom go on the one condition that she gets in inside scoop on Iams pet care and she gives us full reports for my readers here on prestonspeaks.com Over the next couple of weeks I will feature blogs my mom has written about her experiences at the behind the blog influencer summit. To catch up read these blogs : Behind the Paw – Day One and Behind the Paw 2011

Today, she is going to tell us about the plant that makes the dry dog food.

Manufacturing Tour

The bloggers boarded a bus for a several hour trip to Iams/Eukanuba dry dog food manufacturing plant located in Leipsic, Ohio. This town is a very small town with only 2,200 residents in the middle of farm country. I was very interested in this part of the summit since when I’m not taking orders from Preston about what he wants on the blog I work as an analyst for a manufacturing company. So I am knowledgeable in good manufacturing practices and I wanted to see if this plant lived up to the quality products and GMP’s that they claimed. We started our tour with a presentation from Mike the plant manager. He gave us a PowerPoint presentation with alot of information about his plant. He stated that P&G Pet food division has four manufacturing plants in the US and two internationally. His plant has 160 employees with an average of six years with the company. The plant runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week to keep up with demand. It produces 920 SKU’s. A SKU is the bar code on the back of most products. In the manufacturing world identical product may have different sku’s for different customers. For example a promotional item that may have a $5 gift card to a local pet storeinside has a different SKU that the same food that goes to a grocery story. Thus, this plant produced over 900 variously of their product lines which is a difficult task and keeps your quality high and costs low. This plant exports to 28 different countries and was designed to be up to FDA food grade standards. Overall, this plants makes over 600 million pounds of dog and cat food a year. What struck me about the plant manager and his leadership team was how dedicated and passionate they were to their products. You could tell that they truly believed in the mission of the company and they wanted to make the most high quality products possible. They had a sense of pride in the bags of food they produced. The plant has five production lines and they are about to put into production a sixth line to do sample bags.

We also had the opportunity to talk to Jay the Quality Assurance Manager about what steps they take to keep the product safe for our pets as well as for us humans who come in contact with the food. We learned that from the time raw meat products come into the plant to the time you buy the product from the shelf they conduct over 200 quality tests on each and everything that goes into the dog or cat food. They also have a micro lab on site to do more extensive testing. Jay was very committed to make the best products possible for our pets. He stated he would not want to make anything he would not feed his animals.

The lengths they also went to keep the plant clean were amazing. We had to do several foot and shoes dips and rinses as well as wearing protective gear and foot booties just so we wouldn’t cross contaminate any part of the plant. Overall, I was very impressed with this plant. And I really think from my limited knowledge of the manufacturing world this is a world class food grade facility dedicated to providing quality foods but at the same time ensuring the food is safe for our four legged friends as well.

Here is a promotional video about the Leipsic plant and yes I met all those people,(no they aren’t actors), and the plant really does look like the video