Comment by nullspace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullspace | Hacker News Reader

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I stopped ordering cat food from Amazon after one of the sets of cans quite obviously did not come from the manufacturer.

Usually, canned cat food comes in a cardboard box with the manufacturers branding and some important labels, along with X number of cans inside arranged and kept tight in some fashion.

This one was literally a bunch of cans inside a sealed, transparent plastic cover (and then inside the regular amazon box). When I checked the product page from which I purchased, it had only a handful of reviews (versus the usual 1000s of reviews on the real thing), but it had the correct supplier brand name. After reading a bunch about the colocation of products, this was fairly scary.

Nowadays I just buy from Chewy / Petco / Petsmart etc. It's just not worth the risk.

Edit: don't mean to add some FUD or anything with Amazon, I was just expanding parents comments about baby supplies with pets as well. Still buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but not anything where I stand to lose more than money.

I use to buy dog food from Amazon. My dog started getting sick after awhile, so we switched to store bought and she quickly got better. Same brand and type.

Wow. Could you tell there was anything "off" about the food you bought from Amazon? Did they look older than the storebought food?

I couldn’t honestly, which is why we tried a lot of other things before we realized it was the food.

I've bought many cases of cat food from Amazon. So far, they have all come in the standard manufacture packaging.

Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food?

The only problem I had is in one Amazon shipment a few cans got smashed in. Chewy does packaging better!

I can’t answer the question about cat food but there are fakes for one of the cheapest Casio watches out there, so it seems plausible.

https://www.burningimage.net/genuine-and-fake-casio-f91w/

> Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food?

Could be. You could get away with a lot lower product safety and quality for cat food than you could for human food. That means you could make it for a lot cheaper and sell it as a higher quality brand. It's easier to get away with killing or sickening a few cats than it is people.

> Is it worthwhile to 'counterfeit' cat food?

Let me direct you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal.

If people are willing to poison milk with melanine to make a dollar, why wouldn't someone do the same to cat food? In fact, it's already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

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