The dog food stench in Ogden? That’s the smell of 200+ local jobs

When John Patterson started working for Ogden in the early 2000s, he thought the city smelled like the TV dinners of his youth.

“I was mentioning to my administrative assistant about the Swanson plant next door,” he recalled. His assistant told him he wasn’t smelling human food, but the factory at 29th Street and Wall Avenue that makes biscuits and kibble for cats and dogs.

The factory has been producing pet food in Ogden for over fifty years. Alphia has owned it since 2020. At 487,000 square feet, it’s their largest plant.

Patterson found the smell nauseating. He said residents would complain about it at the farmers market or outdoor Christmas festivities downtown.

He was chief administrative officer when Ogden City adopted an odor ordinance in 2007. It put a number on how strong of an odor was considered a nuisance: 7 D/T (dilution to threshold).

Minutes from the April 24, 2007 city council meeting state that Patterson “visited with the principles of American Nutrition Company,” which owned the factory at the time, “and was very impressed with the work they [were] doing to clean up the stench that emanates from their ovens.”

Still, the city bought a field olfactometer, also known as a “nasal ranger,” that same year. To measure a smell, the user breathes through a rubber nose piece while adjusting how much stinky air gets filtered into the machine. A “sniff squad” formed to measure odors around town.

“I recall how awkward the device was, but that’s about all I remember,” said Patterson.

In 2007, Patterson told city council the odor ordinance wasn’t targeted at the pet food factory, though food service establishments were largely exempt.

Looking back, he now thinks the ordinance “has to be a result of [the factory], because there’s nothing else that is universally pungent and odoriferous in Ogden.”

But nothing much came of the hoopla over smells. The city recorder couldn’t find paperwork on sniff test results, and there’s no evidence the city ever fined the factory for emitting too strong a smell. A public records request did show complaints were filed in 2009 and 2010.

And notwithstanding the two complaints filed by one resident in October, current Chief Administrative Officer Mara Brown said the city doesn’t hear much about it anymore.

“It’s gotten better over, certainly, the last 15 years since we’ve had direct communications with [the factory].”

Brown said over the years, the factory has been responsive to code enforcement officers. One communicated directly with the plant.

“If we did feel like the odor was getting more noticeable, she would just call and they would take steps to modify the process.”

The smell is stronger on some days than others.

“It’s just sometimes going to be the wind, sometimes going to be the temperature, and then sometimes it’s SKU-based, or formula-based,” said Brad Teasley, general manager at the Alphia factory. “Some of the fish formulas are going to smell a little bit different.”

Despite the smell, Teasley said the company works to be good neighbors, donating to groups like the YCC Family Crisis Center and Weber Human Services.

A faint scent lingered around Teasley’s desk at the Alphia plant. Entering the office next door, the odor became much stronger.

“That would be me,” said Dave Lusk, director of environmental health and safety for Alphia. “I just came out of the plant.”

He explained the stench comes from the palatants, or flavor enhancers, they put on kibble.

“When you go through that area of the operation, it will kind of stick to you,” he said, noting the smell clings to clothes until they are washed.

In an effort to keep the odor out of the atmosphere, Lusk said they use scrubbers to clean the exhaust, which is then injected with detergent.

“If you’re familiar with Febreze, it has a lot of the same chemical makeup, and so it just is introduced to our exhaust, and it helps to break it down.”

He said Alphia is eyeing new technologies to help even more, but he doesn’t expect anything to change in the next few years.

Before entering the processing facility, Teasley donned a hairnet, hard hat and earplugs. Then he washed his hands and stepped on a pedal to sanitize his shoes.

Rows of pallets of dog food, cat food and treats stretch across the warehouse. Alphia is a private label manufacturer, so they don’t advertise which brands they make. Many would be familiar, though, to dog or cat owners — or “pet parents,” as Teasley calls them.

Past the dock is the biscuit bakery. “We mix everything together, flatten it out on a big cookie sheet, we dump it into a molder,” he said. “We basically put it through a rotary molder, just like you’d make cookies at home.”

Down the factory floor, employees boxed bone-shaped biscuits and fed kibble into large bags from a chute.

Teasley said the factory employs around 200 full-time team members, not counting those in sales and customer service. That labor force is part of why Ogden CAO Mara Brown said Alphia matters to the city.

“They do have an important labor sector of our community,” she said.

“We just strive to balance those things, but certainly want to be open to supporting existing businesses, bringing in new business here, and then absolutely wanting the quality of life for all of our residents to be as optimal as it can be.”

For now, when conditions are just right, the smell of pet food still hangs in the air.

On a visit to Ogden in November, Patterson said he smelled it more than two miles away from the factory.

“I left there in ‘11. Oh, my word, 13 years,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s remarkable. It still stinks.”

Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.