Hikari products - confused, getting upset

[Flutter]

Exactly. I've known about the dog and cat sacrifices for as long as I can remember. As unpleasant as it is... Well... As much as my heart hates it my logic says that I'm against cruelty but for testing. Animal testing may save my life one day, and I want to live...

ETA: Anyways, yes they will kill the fish and no there isn't a way to avoid it and those fish are dying so yours can be better fed so it isn't in vain, the lives aren't taken for nothing.

[LilGreenPuffer]

Them:
"Clare - please understand we are just customer service staff and cannot comment on packaging issues, formulations or any other changes and what the impact of these would be without having our QC, formulation and lab staff comment before hand. They are in a much better position (having significantly more information available to them from research work, formulation testing and production records) to provide information that would be useful to any hobbyist with a specific question like yours. All of these divisions are in Japan which requires that we forward the information overnight and usually have an answer the next evening. Our concern here is that if there is an error on the package, we have a much larger issue to resolve and we want to know up front what we are dealing with so we can properly handle the situation with any customer, especially an informed one like you. We are normally notified of any change to an ingredient panel along with the impact of the change and there has been none on this product so I apologize if you feel we are not being as responsive as you feel we should. All the packages being used in the office show fish meal first and the best before date you provided did not match anything we normally use, so our first answer was an assumption that someone posted something incorrectly on a site, which happens more often than any of us would like. It appears we should have waited to verify all the information with Japan before we commented on your email to avoid providing information that did not match the package you had in your hand or made us appear uncaring. For this we sincerely apologize. We have forwarded all your information to Japan and they have asked us to allow them to answer your email directly. You should be hearing from them within the next 24 hours. If in the mean time we can assist you further, please contact us at your convenience. We appreciate you taking the time to alert us to this issue and your patience so we can collect all the information and answer your question accurately."

Me:
"Thank you."

[LilGreenPuffer]

I got a response in the form of a .PDF document containing a letter from the Japanese end of things. It informed me that they had switched to a higher-quality form of fish meal, and that they needed to use more wheat to maintain the nutritional balance. (If anyone wants to read it, they can PM me with their e-mail address.) They also thanked me for my support; my response to this was basically "What support?"

Someone I know had her friend call Hikari, and he got the same answer, so this is probably the truth, or at least the closest we're getting.

[RTR]

They did at least fess up, and the plus side for them is that they caught a big glitch in internal communication. Ordinarily, such customer service operations get advance warning that changes are coming - to avoid reps getting egg on their (and the company's) face with customers - as obviously happened in their handling of your inquiries. They apparently had not yet learned that lesson. Maybe now they have.

The Japanese are not as big on assigning blame as Americans are. However, they are hot on correcting procedures so that such things do not recur.

[RD.]

While I realize this is an old thread, I couldn't help but weigh in on this discussion.
I've been feeding New Life Spectrum for a number of years, with great results. Having said that, I'm also a personal friend of the creator of NLS fish food, as well as a distributor of his food in Canada.
I have absolutely nothing to hide, and I use the same ID on every forum that I visit, but obviously I have more than just a casual interest in these types of discussions. Now that we have that out of the way ......

Yeah, I've been thinking about that. But since the ingredients are wheat flour, fish meal, soybean meal, gluten meal, krill meal, wheat germ meal, cuttlefish oil, brewers dried yeast, and then all those extracts and chemical things (including MSG, argh!), I think that the flours and grains and plants probably overpower the meat. I'm not a math whiz, but when I compare the number of plant ingredients vs. the number of meat ingredients, and when I consider the order, I think it's a mathematical impossibility in this instance for there to be more meat than plant.

You would be absolutely correct in your assumption. Not only that, but if Hikari has some type of explanation as to how or why a higher quality form of fish meal would equate to their formula requiring more wheat flour (to maintain the nutritional balance?) I would certainly love to hear it. The reality is, it would not. Wheat flours main purpose in any commercial fish food product is that of a binding agent, that is it helps hold the pellet together. (as does gluten meal) Most fish that tend to fall on the carnivorous side of the equation (including those species classified as insectivores) typically have a difficult time assimilating excessive amounts of terrestrial plant matter, especially grains. What that means is that only a portion of the crude protein % posted on the label will actually be available to your betta, as they will only be able to assimilate so much protein from carbs/starch/grain.

In a formula that is supposedly designed with betta fish in mind, ideally one would want to see the "total" carbohydrate content below 20%, and due to the anti-nutritional factors found in soybean meal I personally refuse to feed any product that contains soybean meal, period. There are safer soy alternatives, but they cost a LOT more, hence they are seldom used within the aquaculture circles.

I would gladly welcome reps from any company to come into a discussion such as this and explain in detail how raw ingredients such as corn flakes, dried bakery products, and MSG add nutritional value to their products. Personally I would love nothing more than to see a LOT more accountability within this industry, instead of everyone wasting their resources & funds on advertising, and marketing. I have no doubt that some of the major manufacturers spend more money on advertising in a single month, than New Life has since their inception, 15+ yrs ago. Who do you think ultimately pays for those full page glossy advertisements in the various trade magazines? Personally I would prefer to see a manufacturer put their money into what matters the most, such as the raw ingredients of their products.

As far as Hikari performing necropsies, I hope that Flutter is hanging on to that chair.
The following is a prime example of a so called study that was performed by Hikari, that was screaming out for necropsies to be performed.
http://www.hikari.info/topics/pdf/inter_sakihikari.pdf

Instead of actually taking the time to check for fat deposits (which I'm guessing they would have found - hmmmm) they wrapped that little feed trial up by running a "stress test", which simply involved removing the fish from water, and then seeing how long it took for them to die. All that talk about lipid (fat) levels in their food, flabby koi, etc, and the best they could come up with to ascertain actual fat deposits in these fish was to use a "weight per body length" formula???
Instead they allow all of the fish to die, and do not perform necropsies where the actual fat levels in the fish could have been accurately taken, and recorded.

If you still have that PDF document on file I would love to read it.

Neil

[Flutter]

I guess this makes me a bit extra happy that I feed the NLS food Meh, I heard it was good so that's what I've been feeding. If only the fish would eat it

[RD.]

Well hopefully you didn't fall out of your chair after reading that.

[Flutter]

Na, I'm still in it though after a whole day of studying in it I believe the floor would be more comfortable

I didn't have time to read it but am I understanding correctly that they're not doing necropsies as part of their research (regarding the Koi and fatty deposits)? Not that I really support them but I do believe they would be vital to determine the physiological effects of the food.

[RD.]

Correct, no necropsies were performed. (yet all fish were in fact killed)

If one is running a feed trial on fish, and fatty deposits are in question, the fish should have a proper necropsy performed at the end of the feed trial and one would check for lipid accumulation in & around the liver. You can't just look at a fish, and know for certain whether severe vacuolation of hepatocytes is taking place, or not, yet this is exactly what Keita Harada of Kyorin's Yamazaki Research Institute did - who ironically is the exact same person that sent the PDF file to LilGreenPuffer, explaining why they had to add more wheat flour to their formula. Honestly, I have never read so much BS in my entire life. In the PDF file Keita Harada basically blames the quality of their fish meal as to why they chose to use less.......... less fish meal, less pollution, etc, when in reality all they had to do was pony up for some high quality fish meal, instead of using fish meal derived from processing plant leftovers. Yes, certainly high ash content fish meal will contribute to water pollution, but that doesn't mean that the solution is to simply reduce the fish meal content, and/or add extra wheat flour. The solution is to utilize higher quality, low ash, fish meal, such as whole herring meal, but of course, that tends to push costs up. We wouldn't want that ............

[LilGreenPuffer]

I would pay ten times as much for a better food, personally. I've been using NLS, HBH, Atison's, Omega One, and Ken's (and frozen and live, of course). Atison's and NLS aren't cheap, I had to pay shipping for most of them, and all but HBH were hard to find, but it's worth it to me. One thing I like about Ken - he runs a small company that doesn't make massive profits, he personally communicates with customers, and he makes his money through customer loyalty instead of by making his products lower-quality.

One of my next projects is making my own gel-based food. I'll choose and see every single ingredient that goes into it. It'll be an insectivore formula containing frozen insect larvae, canned insects, and live (well, live when purchased) insect larvae, plus vitamins and maybe a couple of other invertebrates - blackworms, bloodworms, shrimp, etc. I'll be able to reduce the filler and binder ingredients to a minimum, just gelatin, and I'll know that every single ingredient is actually good for my fish and geared towards their natural diet.

[Flutter]

That's cool LGP. A lady near me made her own fish food and has a pound of it waiting for me in the freezer, I'm hoping my cories will eat it. It appears I have the only picky cories in existence