(262) 375-9111 LaBudde@LaBudde.com

 

 

Pet food ingredients are a huge portion of Labudde Group’s business. Growing with the changing market trends through the year has been interesting. A current market trend is to have grain free mixes. Nutritionally your dog still needs a carbohydrate in their diet, and physically the manufacturer needs that starch/carbohydrate to help produce the right consistency with their kibble. One of the main staples in dog food has been potatoes.

Our sister company, Clean Dried Processing in Nevada, is busy manufacturing a Potato Powder that is made utilizing the whole potato. But we are using the ugly, unwanted potatoes. Have you ever noticed your potatoes in the store are a fairly uniform size and shape. Just perfect for the delicious baked potato with your steak. In reality, potatoes come in all shapes and sizes. They can weight over a pound and be as large as a football. Now that is a big potato!!!

Potato growers grade their potatoes during harvest and anything that is too big for processing or has too many dark spots, or is “ugly” gets downgraded to either “chippers” or “B grade”. Chippers are potatoes that can still work for use in potato chip production. Size is monitored because you don’t want a potato chip the size of a cross section of a football!! The B Grade potatoes are the remainder that don’t work physically for traditional food uses.

Labudde Group and Clean Dried Processing have teamed up and coordinate with the growers to provide a valuable outlet for this product that nutritionally is perfectly good, just not physically pretty enough for the store. We wash and dice the potatoes before sending them through our drum drier. The finished dried potato smells like fresh breakfast potatoes and looks like dehydrated hash brown potatoes.

We custom grind potatoes to our customer’s needs for pet food providing a home for these unwanted potatoes. Our facility in Nevada is GMP+ (Good Manufacturing Procedures) approved and strives to produce a clean, consistent product that meets the needs of today’s pet food market. Consumers are asking for traceability and quality that is on the same level as the food humans eat, but still want economically priced food. We are able to meet this need by producing in a facility that is set up for animal feed production, but has all the processing and traceability demanded by the industry.

Traceability is huge for pet food manufacturers.(Many of the procedures they have used through the years, we are also seeing brought into the feedmill and farm animal feed industry.) The FSMA or Food Safety Modernization Act is slowly being adopted around the US to help certify that the animal feed chain is safe. We are seeing changes such as documentation of what a bulk truck previously hauled so any contamination can be followed back to possible sources. Audits of paperwork and inspection of processing facilities is also a common occurrence for pet food manufacturers. We open our doors regularly so the companies that purchase products from us can inspect and audit our facilities for cleanliness and production practices.

LaBudde Group and Clean Dried Processing take pride in the fact we have not failed an audit. We are GMP+ certified so that we can keep up a standard that meets the needs of our customers. This in turn helps them to provide a safe product for the cats and dogs who enjoy their food every day. Feeding the world is a complicated process that includes feeding the animals that feed the world and the animals that are part of our families. Quality and Sustainability are priorities for LaBudde Group. Potatoes are just one of our arsenal of products that utilize the “ugly” that humans don’t use everyday.