Now I’m morbidly intrigued – what horror stories regarding brown bouffalant are we speaking of, and has anything been done about it?

Well…

For starters, I’m not even sure if the materials used to make Brown Bouffalant is entirely edible. For one thing, as recently as earlier this month, it was found that they use pidove feathers as filler. To give you an idea of why that’s bad, that would be very much akin to humans eating cardboard … which, according to one recall, was also used in their dry foods at one point.

Granted, the cardboard was more of an accidental contaminant, which leads us to the next point that is the fact that Brown Bouffalant frequently recalls batches of its product due to contaminants of one sort or another. Last year, an entire line of wet food was recalled due to contamination with heightened levels of miltank hormones (which trigger dehydration and frequent urination in some species of canine pokémon), but there were also the three separate occasions in the past five years in which one particular type of food or another was recalled due to contamination with listeria, salmonella, and for reasons I would love to know myself, formaldehyde. Even the foods that pass inspection (somehow) aren’t always safe, as people who feed their products to their pokémon have also reported everything from mold in the bottom of dry food bags to unexplained kidney failure.

That is, of course, during and after production (although it perhaps says something about the way it treats its workers if standards had been set that low). When it comes to sourcing its materials, well, let’s just say that if your food is contaminated with pidove feathers or salmonella, those aren’t signs that your food sources are treated well.

Of course, Brown Bouffalant has been in and out of the courtroom over these incidents for at least a decade, which in turn has led to the stricter regulations you might have heard about when it comes to pokémon food production. Still, even with these regulations in place and even with the government’s reassurance that Brown Bouffalant’s production methods are completely up to both health and sustainability standards, you still hear about Brown Bouffalant in the news far too often for that brand to be worth it.

The main reason why it’s still around, though, is in part due to the fact that, ultimately, they’re the cheapest pokémon food brand on the market. The other part is frankly a complete mystery, but I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with its parent corporation, Rocket Corp.