Breeder’s Choice Celebrates Opening of New Pet Food Safety Lab

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Press release: Breeders Choice Pet Foods

Breeder’s Choice Pet Foods recently marked the official grand opening of its newly opened Pet Food Safety Lab (PFSL) on July 29 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony to inaugurate the brand-new state-of-the-art facility.

Breeder’s Choice invested $1 million in the Pet Food Safety Lab and related facility improvements. The Pet Food Safety Lab is a world-class testing facility serving the pet food industry and its consumers with microbiological, chemical, and physical testing methods to assure raw material and finished product quality and safety.

Breeder’s Choice Pet Foods, originally established in 1947, is currently celebrating its 75^th anniversary this year. Since it was acquired by Lucy Pet Products in December of 2020, the company has invested significantly in its people, infrastructure, quality, safety and new product innovation.

The new Pet Food Safety Lab enables Breeder’s Choice Pet Foods to offer expanded testing services to its co-manufacturing brand customers and is creating new jobs within the community as the lab boasts a staff of food chemists, microbiologists and lab technicians.

The grand opening is a culmination of nearly eleven months of planning, development, and construction.

“Every decision we make starts and ends with quality. From the nutrition formulations, raw materials we source, people in our plant, and the Quality Safety testing at every step, everything we do contributes to the pets who eat the foods we produce.” said Joey Herrick, CEO.  “This was a major project for us in the midst of COVID-19 and supply chain disruptions, everything took longer than we anticipated.” Herrick continued.

Since its inception in 1947, Breeder’s Choice has produced super premium pet foods and built a reputation for quality that is unrivaled in the industry.  After recent acquisition by Lucy Pet Products led by industry legend Joey Herrick (founder of Natural Balance Pet Foods), Breeder’s Choice has taken quality to a new level by building a laboratory strictly dedicated to analysis of pet food raw materials and finished product.

In addition to testing for known microbiological and chemical containments, the new lab includes DNA testing of proteins and dedicated PCR testing capabilities (Polymerase Chain Reaction). PCR is a highly accurate way to diagnose certain diseases and genetic changes. With PCR, the PFSL has the ability to assure that pet food has been vigorously tested for any dangerous microbiological organisms before any product is released to the market.  Further, the state-of-the-art liquid chromatography system equipped with a triple quad mass spectrophotometer detector (LCMS) can test for a variety of contaminants as well as verify nutrient/vitamin levels.