Product Testing

Too good to be true

When we first came across Byotrol in 2005 to be perfectly truthful we were quite sceptical about its claims. This was in the early days of the company before the current body of evidence had been put together and it just sounded too good to be true.

Friends & Family

So we started in the time honoured tradition of testing on friends and family, including Stephen Falder's (the inventor of Byotrol) own dog Riejka. She was Riejka by name and reeker by nature and was the perfect subject.

Wickham Laboratories

These trials all went well, so with the help of Dr Iain B Glen BVMS, PhD, FRCA (by Election), DVA, MRCVS www.glenpharma.com we commissioned two studies with Wickham Laboratories, where we tested the original of Byotrol to European Standards EN 1676 and EN 1677 against a veterinarian cocktail of fungi and bacteria respectively. These tests allowed us to determine how much Byotrol we needed to put in our products to make them effective.

Veterinarian Study

After an initial pilot study with Holly House Veterinarian practice in Knutsford, we recruited a further 8 vets from across the country through a small article in the Veterinary Times. These vets then supervised the trials of 106 smelly hounds from a variety of different habitats: from the gilded pavements of South Kensington in London to beach-walkers in Jersey.

• Broom Cottage Vet. Surgery Wilmslow
• Dundas Vet. Group Edinburgh
• Hird & Partners Ripponden
• Holly House Vet. Surgery Knutsford
• Kynance Vet. Clinic South Kensington
• New Era Vet. Hospital Jersey
• Pengelly & Mizen Vet. Practice Peterborough
• St. George’s Vet. Group Wolverhampton
• Vet Care Limited Sale

Trial Results

The results of these trials were truly amazing, particularly if you consider that we were using scent-free versions of the products, so there were no perfumes masking any pongs. Every single dog in the trial improved. We had a 100% success rate!

Every owner had to keep a 3 week odour diary of how their pet smelled over the period and how often they applied the product. With the benefit of hindsight the scale we used for the trial was a bit over ambitious. Dogs are never going to smell “fresh”, we should perhaps have used “natural” as the final state.

However as you can see from the graph, the shampoo always worked straightaway and the spray took 2 to 3 days to make an impact. Now that we have added a perfume to the product, most people find that the spray and the wipes now work straightaway with the perfume masking the odour, while the Byotrol gets on with the serious business of killing the micro-organisms that are really generating the smells.

Safety

The trials not only proved that the products was effective, they also showed that the products are safe. All the animals were inspected by the vets at the beginning and end of the trial and none showed any adverse effects. This has been borne out in the subsequent two and a half years of sales. We have sold over a million Byotrol pet products without any proven adverse reactions.