Quote:
Originally Posted by Nancy1999  I have three questions:
1. Where does Royal Canin buy the chicken meal?
2. Where does Royal Caniin buy its chicken by-product meal?
3. Where does Royal Canin buy all it's vitamins?
I know RC is an international company and wonder what countries they purchase these things from. |
Hello everyone!
Suppliers are a great topic of interest when it comes to ... well, ANYTHING for that matter!
Royal Canin sources ingredients locally wherever possible, which means the supplier of specific ingredients will be different for each manufacturing facility. As I am a nutritionist, and don’t work in the supply chain department, I don’t know the specific supplier of every ingredient. We have associates whose jobs are dedicated to sourcing, validating, and maintaining our suppliers. What I can tell you is that every supplier we use must go through a strict validation process before we incorporated them into our process. This involves a dedicated team flying to the supplier's site, evaluating their facility, their animals/birds and also collecting initial samples. These samples are then sent to our Americas Regional Lab (here in Guelph) where they are tested for quality, safety and nutritional parameters. But it doesn't stop there. Why? At any time the ingredient they send you could be different from the initial sample they provided you. This is why every single delivery of ingredients to every single manufacturing facility must go through a series of tests before it’s added to our inventory. Yes that means 100% of ingredients are tested before being used in any RC Health Nutrition formula. We also have extensive traceability. This enables us to trace back all detailed information, from the temperature and conditions the kibble was cooked in, the ingredients that were used, the results from the tests that were performed on each ingredient all the way back to the individual supplier of that ingredient who can also provide traceability on their part. In addition, retained samples of ingredients and finished product are held on site in a climate controlled room. Full traceability allows us to look at any specific details about a formula if there were were any questions regarding a specific bag of our formula from a consumer.
China came up as a specific mention, and while none of our protein sources for our Canadian or US plants come from China, I would like to address the question briefly. Avoiding ingredients from a country does not guarantee safety. There was a devastating incident related to ingredients from China, but that doesn't make China the only place capable of producing or containing contaminated or otherwise dangerous ingredients or products. Think in Canada with the recent beef recall and in the US with a Texas ingredient supplier. Sub-quality or contaminated ingredients can come from anywhere, including our own NA backyard! Regardless of where ingredients come from, it is critical to have multiple steps in place to confirm their quality, digestibility, safety, and nutrition. NIRS (which I introduced in a previous post) is one the initial analysis completed on ingredient when entering our plant. It can perform analysis to predict specific nutrition values (such as protein, moisture, fat etc.) but also matching what you could consider a "fingerprint" of the sample to a validated global database for RC. The fingerprint would identify if anything with the structure of the ingredient is not correct, which could include a contaminate in the ingredient. Both analysis are confirmed at the Americas Regional Laboratory.
If you have more specific supplier question, please feel free to phone in and discuss your questions with an RC associate for your country As I continue to encourage questions from everyone, I will stick to the area of my expertise, which is nutrition
.
Have a great day!
Ashley
