Victor Dog Food – 2023 Recall to Current Date

What Happened

In late 2023, Victor dog food was pulled off the shelves. I actually had some on order with Amazon through subscribe and save and it was just gone. The product listing also disappeared…the sad confused french bulldog that Amazon was showing at the time for items no longer listed. The reason for the recall was potential Salmonella contamination which you can read in the company’s press release here. The FDA investigated 7 potential Salmonella cases in humans believed to be related to this dog food which you can read about here.

Resolution

The company didn’t follow up about this recall until April 1, 2024 when they put out a press release outlining which “best by” dates were safe and ensuring that they had enhanced safety measures around production so that this would not happen again. I don’t actually see any authoritative information through the FDA or the company’s website admitting or concluding on whether these Salmonella cases were the result of contaminated pet food but given the enhanced safety procedures and reading between the lines, it was. There is an article that indicates the CDC concluded the dog food was likely linked to the Salmonella cases in question.

There was a class action of Mid-America Pet Food, the owner of Victor dog food, which you can read about here. Some owners claimed that their dogs became severely ill which resulted in euthanasia in some instances. The last court activity was April 19, 2024. You can follow the case here. Hopefully the impacted owners get something. I do feel like pet food companies think it’s ok to pump out garbage since it’s just being fed to dogs.

Conclusion

Realistically, the company did pretty aggressively pull product off the shelves. There was one production facility that the contaminated food came from but it appeared basically all products were pulled until they narrowed that down, so they definitely lost a ton of money doing the recall. Even with that though, they do need to make things right with impacted owners. Really, I think they could have saved money by just offering compensation to impacted owners. Letting things turn into a class action is likely going to cost. I am imagining they will want to settle since that is easier than rolling the dice with a judge and jury. We we will put out an update once the cases have worked their way through the court system.