QUALITY IS A LONG TERM SELL. It’s one of my favorite expressions, and I use it a lot when making sales presentations to buyers of our "American Dog" chews against cheaper imported products. Throw in a buyer fresh out of graduate school, who doesn’t own a pet, and Quality becomes a TOUGH sell.

When you really stop to think about it, what exactly does quality mean? Quality should stand for the product that meets your needs the most completely. Unfortunately, quality usually is confused with which product looks best, or packaged best, or advertised the most, or has the highest price.

For chewable pet products, the definition of quality becomes even more difficult. Not only do we lack the first hand experience of tasting the product, many times a bone is thrown to our dogs just to keep them occupied, and out of our way. How many people actually know how long their pet takes to go through a dog bone? The usual answers are "within seconds", "about a half hour", "less than a day" or "a couple of days, if it isn’t buried in the yard."

In a recent issue of Whole Dog Journal, an article entitled "Chew on This" analyzes and rates dog chews available in the market today. The journal touched on issues in our industry relating to lack of regulations, the need to buy from reliable sources, and the actual ingredient contents of many chews in the market. The article touched upon issues of safety and quality. At the end of the article, Pet Factory is listed as a company which meets all the journal standards for quality and safety. Two of the three other companies listed just happen to be our customers. This was a pleasant affirmation of our company’s standards relating to the quality of our products.

Pet Factory will continue to manufacture products from US beefhides, in environmentally safe and controlled facilities. It is something which we pride ourselves on, something we continually work on, and something which certainly is a long term sell.

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