What was recalled
The 2018 event spanned multiple J.M. Smucker / Big Heart Pet Brands SKUs manufactured 2016 through February 2018: Gravy Train canned dog food (recalled February 2018 — covered separately on our Gravy Train 2018 page), Kibbles ’N Bits canned, Ol’ Roy Walmart private-label canned varieties, and Skippy Premium Chunks. The full multi-brand portfolio scope is documented on our J.M. Smucker 2018 portfolio recall page. This page covers the supply-chain story that connected those events: how a euthanasia drug ended up in finished pet food across multiple brands made at multiple facilities.
The trigger was a February 2018 ABC7 Washington (WJLA-TV) investigation that commissioned independent laboratory testing on Gravy Train cans after pet owner Nikki Mael reported a multi-dog illness cluster in her household following meals of Gravy Train. The lab results returned positive for pentobarbital in Gravy Train cans. The FDA followed up with its own testing in February 2018, confirmed pentobarbital in finished product, and on March 13, 2018 began a joint inspection with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture at the JBS USA rendering facility in Souderton, Pennsylvania that supplied Smucker’s beef tallow. The FDA Constituent Update at its Outbreaks and Advisories archive documents the timeline; Food Safety News’ March 2018 reporting documents the cross-brand scope.
Why it was recalled
The root cause was a rendering supply-chain segregation failure. JBS USA Holdings Inc. operates one of the largest U.S. animal-rendering operations, which collects and processes animal carcasses, fat trimmings, bone, and offal from slaughterhouses, dead-on-arrival livestock, and other sources into finished products including tallow, meat-and-bone meal, and poultry meal. Tallow destined for pet food should be sourced from FDA-edible streams — meat and fat from animals slaughtered for human consumption that are inspected and free of euthanasia drugs.
The 2018 FDA investigation found that pentobarbital-contaminated material had entered the JBS tallow stream, almost certainly from euthanized cattle (typically dairy cows euthanized at end of productive life, or downed-animal carcasses) that were accepted into the rendering pipeline without sufficient segregation from human-edible streams. Pentobarbital is the most common large-animal euthanasia drug; it persists through rendering temperatures and is detectable at parts-per-billion in finished tallow and any food product made with that tallow. The FDA found pentobarbital in 4 of 9 samples at the JBS facility. A subsequent 2019 Food Safety News investigation reported allegations that JBS had knowingly distributed pentobarbital-adulterated product to customers after internal testing detected contamination — documented at Food Safety News’ May 2019 reporting. The FDA issued a Warning Letter to the JBS facility documenting violations of FDA tallow-sourcing requirements.
Health risks for your pet
Pentobarbital toxicity in dogs presents as sedation, ataxia, slurred or wobbly gait, decreased respiration, hypothermia, and at high enough doses respiratory depression and death. The Tomlinson family’s 9-year-old Shih Tzu Tito died after eating Gravy Train; other reported cases included rolling household clusters where multiple dogs in a single home became simultaneously ill after meals from the same can. Pentobarbital is a schedule II controlled substance in the U.S. and has no FDA-tolerated level in pet food — any detection constitutes adulteration under FDA Compliance Policy Guide section 690.300 on pentobarbital in animal food. The half-life of pentobarbital in dogs is approximately 4-8 hours; clinical signs typically resolve with supportive care within 24-72 hours unless the dose was lethal.
What to do if you bought affected product
The 2018 Big Heart Pet Brands recalls are completed and affected product is no longer in distribution. If you currently feed Gravy Train, Kibbles ’N Bits, Ol’ Roy, or Skippy canned dog food, current production is post-recall and uses tallow from sources that JBS USA and J.M. Smucker have certified as pentobarbital-free under post-2018 verification protocols. If your dog develops sudden sedation, ataxia, or unexplained slow respiration after a meal of canned dog food — particularly if multiple pets in the same household show signs after the same product — contact your veterinarian or the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center (888-426-4435) immediately. The FDA Safety Reporting Portal remains the official channel for pet illness reports tied to specific products.
How this affects KibbleIQ’s grade
The brands affected (Gravy Train, Kibbles ’N Bits, Ol’ Roy, Skippy) are scored or partially scored in the KibbleIQ database on their current ingredient lists per our published methodology. The 2018 supply-chain failure was a shared-supplier root cause rather than per-brand quality-systems failure: the JBS USA tallow stream was the contamination source, and any brand sourcing tallow from that supply chain during 2016-2018 had exposure risk. Modern Big Heart Pet Brands tallow sourcing has been substantially restructured since the 2018 event. Recall-history scoring under our planned methodology v2 will treat this event as a category signal rather than a brand-specific signal, since the supplier’s practices — not the four finished-food manufacturers’ quality control — were the root cause. The Big Heart 2018 event remains industry-canonical for demonstrating how rendering supply-chain segregation failure propagates across multiple finished-food brands.